LOCATION ATTRIBUTES OF EMERGING ECONOMIES: AN ANALYSIS USING PRINCIPAL COMPONENTS

Our paper investigates the location attributes of a large sample of emerging economies from the perspective of foreign direct investments and multinational companies presence abroad. We use several macroeconomic variables that take into account the relevant location attributes for the decision of multinational companies to invest abroad and include them in a Principal Components Analysis to reveal the most relevant locational attributes or combination of such attributes that influence the decision of multinational companies to invest abroad. We find that only four variables had the most important contributions to the principal components: GDP per capita, international reserves, mobile phones subscriptions and labour force. Labour force is the variable that contributes the most to the first factor and its contribution grows in importance as we depart from 1994. At the same time GDP per capita has become less important in recent years

THE PERFORMANCE OF MUTUAL FUNDS IN SLOVAKIA

A good indicator for the financial markets performance in different countries is the evolution of mutual funds in terms of their inflows and outflows. The goal of the present paper is to analyse the performance of the mutual funds in Slovakia. The research objectives are twofold: to study the flows of funds into and out of mutual funds from Slovakia during the period 2007-2014 and to analyse how investors in Slovakian mutual funds behave in terms of their investment choice. The analysis focuses on identifying patterns in investors' decision making process and on examining the similarity of their behavioural patterns with the ones identi¬fied at international level

FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENTS AND INSTITUTIONAL PERFORMANCE: A ROMANIAN PERSPECTIVE

Our paper uses statistical tools with the aim of empirically investigating the institutional determinants of foreign direct in- vestments (FDI) in Romania. The analysis is focused on the public policies that are relevant from the FDI perspective between 2002 and 2012; more specifically, we direct our approach towards identifying the manner in which state controlled instruments can be employed in order to increase the country’s performance in terms of attracting FDI. The variables we use are the inflows of FDI to Romania, on one hand, and the set of Worldwide Governance Indicators of the World Bank on the other hand

Corruption and Organised Crime Signalling Indicators for Foreign Investors as Applied to Eastern European Countries

The former communist countries in Central and Eastern Europe and, implicitly, their economies, went through specific and sometimes asymmetric developments since the fall of the “iron curtain” at the end of the 1980s. During those years, they faced many challenges to create a secure and predictable economic environment for individuals and businesses, local or foreign. We propose a framework that considers legal, social, and economic indicators which can be used by foreign investors to make wise and efficient business decisions. Our main purpose is to expand the traditional economic analysis framework and enrich it with new institutional and societal indicators from the social, quality of life and legal layers of research. This new landscape could offer relevant information on vulnerabilities that could favour organized crime and corruption in some Central and Eastern European countries, a factor that foreign investors may need to address before deciding to invest in the region. Keywords: foreign direct investments, organised crime, corruption, economic vulnerabilities, GD

FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENTS AND INSTITUTIONAL PERFORMANCE: A ROMANIAN PERSPECTIVE

Abstract: Our paper uses statistical tools with the aim of empirically investigating the institutional determinants of foreign direct investments (FDI) in Romania. The analysis is focused on the public policies that are relevant from the FDI perspective between 2002 and 2012; more specifically, we direct our approach towards identifying the manner in which state controlled instruments can be employed in order to increase the country's performance in terms of attracting FDI. The variables we use are the inflows of FDI to Romania, on one hand, and the set of Worldwide Governance Indicators of the World Bank on the other hand

THE PERFORMANCE OF MUTUAL FUNDS IN SLOVAKIA

Abstract: A good indicator for the financial markets performance in different countries is the evolution of mutual funds in terms of their inflows and outflows. The goal of the present paper is to analyse the performance of the mutual funds in Slovakia. The research objectives are twofold: to study the flows of funds into and out of mutual funds from Slovakia during the period 2007-2014 and to analyse how investors in Slovakian mutual funds behave in terms of their investment choice. The analysis focuses on identifying patterns in investors' decision making process and on examining the similarity of their behavioural patterns with the ones identified at international level