Does Foreign Direct Investment Have an Effect on Economic Development? The Case of Bulgaria

There is a big amount of literature in the recent decades about the broad effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on the development of the recipient country. Interestingly, policy-making has come to ignore the ambiguous and inconclusive academic research results in terms of the benefits and costs of FDI. Almost every country nowadays strives to attract foreign investment most probably due to the success stories of some countries that have achieved rapid economic growth after encouraging FDI (China, Ireland, Hungary, Czech Republic). It is beyond doubt that transnational corporations (TNCs) possess much of the world’s stock of technological knowledge and are productively using it. However, it is not so obvious whether the host countries can benefit from that knowledge.