Does Foreign Aid Promote Foreign Direct Investment in Post-conflict Cambodia?

Abstract

Post-conflict Cambodia has experienced a significant increase in foreign aid and foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows since the early 1990s. This paper investigates whether (aggregate, donor-specific, and sectoral-based disaggregate) foreign aid has any short- and long-run crowding-in effects on FDI inflows using autoregressive distributed lag (ARDL) bound test for cointegration over the 1992–2018 post-conflict period. Robust findings reveal that aggregate development aid and ‘donor-specific’ aid from Australia and United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) crowding-in FDI in the long run. Donor-specific aid from the EU, the US, Japan and France, and sectoralbased ‘governance aid’ and ‘other aid’ either have non-robust positive or no significant long-run effects on FDI. In the short run, however, only EU-aid and other-aid have crowding-in effects on FDI. Foreign development aid can catalyse FDI inflows in postconflict Cambodia, especially in the long run.