Symposium: What Do We Mean by FDI?

[This is a post-publication review symposium] Andrew Kerner’s ISQ paper aptly titled, “What We Talk About When We Talk About Foreign Direct Investment” (2014) asks us to consider how we conceptualize and measure foreign direct investment. FDI is a topic that has received considerable attention from international and comparative scholars working in political science, economics, and other fields. As Kerner as well as the contributors to the symposium note, FDI has been empirically modeled many different ways. What is missing though is greater thought about the concept, construct validity and then ultimately measurement. The foundation of empirical research in this domain requires it. [...]