The Relationship Between Foreign Direct Investment and Economic Growth: Central Asian Countries

Recently, the economic literature has been focusing on researching the impact of foreign direct investment (FDI) on economic growth. It should not be forgotten that the problem of evaluating the impact of FDI on economic growth from an empirical point of view is theoretically more controversial. If we look at the literature, there have been a lot of applied studies on this subject in recent years and these studies vary. Some researchers noted the positive impact of FDI on economic growth, while others found a negative relationship between these variables.Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has become an important source of economic growth in Central Asian countries (Kazakhstan, Kyrgyzstan, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan and Uzbekistan). Therefore, this study deals with the relationship between foreign direct investment and economic growth in Central Asian countries. For the analysis made in this study, data from the 2001-2016 years were used. Analysis was done by Panel data analysis. The data were taken from the World Bank database and UNCTADSTAT.The purpose of this study is to indicate whether there is a relationship between foreign direct investments and economic growth. If there is a relationship between these variables, how is the relationship; positive or negative? In this context, Unit root test was applied to see whether the variables are stationary in our study. After determining that our variables are stationary, we applied tests such as delay test of VAR model first, then VAR model stability test, Panel VAR Granger Causality / Block Externality Wald Tests, Variance research test and OLS. According to the results of the delay-length selection criteria model, we chose the second delay because SC has the smallest value in the first delay. According to the variance research method, GDP originates from 90% of itself in the tenth period and 10% from FDI. Likewise, FDI appears to have originated from 84% itself in the tenth period and 16% from GDP. According to the OLS test results, the impact of FDI on GDP is positive, and a percent increase in foreign direct investments significantly increases GDP by 0.78 percent, since the P value is 0.