Reports on trends in international direct investment tend to focus on recent developments. While such information is clearly of most relevance for policymakers and others interested in the pace and scale of globalisation, it fails to provide any perspective on the nature of globalisation itself. By their nature, recent developments give more weight to the cyclical element in global investment flows. A country’s performance in terms of annual inflows is often taken as a measure of the appropriateness of its policies and, by extension, of its relative attractiveness as a location for investment. Such important issues can only be assessed over a long time period and relying on more sources of information than simply flows of foreign direct investment (FDI). This study focuses on such long-term trends and includes, where appropriate, other estimates of multinational activity.

By focusing on long-term patterns, this paper demonstrates how FDI has evolved from an activity largely ...