Foreign DIRECT INVESTMENT FROM 1990-2017
Other
We want to see whether the Economist writer was correct with regard to FDI, and we have the data source to use to find out. The data is provided by the United Nations Commission on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and can be accessed by clicking on https://unctadstat.unctad.org/wds/ReportFolders/re… . Proceed to the data table by clicking on “Foreign Direct Investment” to the left.
Here is the assignment(totally 6 graphs):
1. For the two periods 1990-2010 and 2011-2017, create a spreadsheet for
- World inward flows of FDI
- Inward flows for developed economies
- Inward flows for developing economies
2. Create trend line graphs for the three data series for the two periods.
3. Compare the two periods and determine whether there was a slowdown in FDI inflows. In addition to simply examining what the graphs portray, you might compare beginning and end points for the two periods and compute the growth rates for each period (for each data series).
4. Do the same graphs and comparisons for FDI outward flows.
5. Using the data from your spreadsheets, compute the year-to-year percentage changes over the two periods. Create a bar graph of these percentage changes, which will give you a good visual picture of the volatility of FDI. From this data compute the average percentage change for both periods and the standard deviation for the two periods. What do you conclude in comparing the two periods with this computed data?
Note: You can download the UNCTAD data to Excel. However, I found that I could not enable editing. I was able to copy the data from the UNTAD table and paste it into Excel and from there do the calculations.
