Class: ECON-429
Professor: Sajal Lahiri
April 15, 2011
“Foreign Direct Investment in Ireland: Policy Implications for Emerging Economies” is a scholarly journal article which is written by Peter J. Buckley and Frances Ruane of the University of Leeds and Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. The article is well structured and starts off with an introduction explaining how the important role of multinational enterprises (MNEs) in the global economy relates to issues of how the foreign direct investment (FDI) they control impacts on overall economic activity in the receiving countries. It explains that specific emphasis is centered on how the government can influence FDI policies and thereby attract more of an audience. The journal article focuses the entire paper on the FDI in Ireland because of two primary reasons: 1) because Ireland has consistently promoted export-platform inward investment into the manufacturing sector for over four decades, and 2) MNEs in the Ireland economy now account for fifty percent of manufacturing employment and are the focal point of restructuring of the Irish manufacturing sector over the past twenty years. The introduction then goes on to explain that there are four sections of the paper (the first being the introduction itself). The second section examines literature that emphasizes the selective promotion of MNEs, as well as the DFI policies that have promoted MNEs on a selective basis in Ireland. The third section shows primarily how Ireland has attempted to establish industrial clusters in manufacturing, while the fourth and final section draws out some policy propositions for newly emerging economies, which are based on the Irish policy experience. For the second section of the journal article, it explains that until the 1970s there was pretty much an implication of free mobility of capital across sectors. Then, it explains, the ‘Internalization School’ provided a strong connection between MNEs