Patrick J. W. Egan

Foreign Direct Investment and Economic Reform

My work in economic reform is an outgrowth of my interest in multinationals and their impact on politics in the developing world. I am convinced that firms not only react to reform in developing countries, but also have a strong influence on reform themselves.

In a single-authored work which has appeared in Latin American Politics and Society (spring 2010), I argue that multinational firms have been a consistent lobbying force for economic reform in 15 Latin American countries. Using a fifteen year GMM time series analysis, I show the cumulative effect of stocks of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) on five indices of economic reform, ranging from trade liberalization to privatization of state enterprises. This research is also unique in that it disaggregates investment flows to show how differing sectoral patterns of investment impact reform in different ways.

Investment Risk and Labor Rights Research

I am currently engaged in a project that links measures of business risk in a large set of developing countries with labor right regimes in those countries over time. I have compiled a composite index of investment risk based on a set of assessment tools popular in the international investment community, and have examined how collective labor right violations can impact these risk assessments. I presented the results of this research at a conference on labor rights in 2006, and the resulting paper has recently been given a conditional acceptance at the Review of International Political Economy.

Other Interests and Future Research Agendas

I am currently preparing for submission a co-authored piece with Juan Bogliaccini that analyzes the relationship between Foreign Direct Investment and informality (and, by extension, inequality) in a number of Latin American countries. Using publicly available inequality and informality measures, we argue that FDI has varying impacts on informality depending on the dominant sector of investment. We find that FDI in manufacturing is associated with increased levels of informality, while FDI in wholesale trade is associated with decreased informality.

There are a number of ways in which I hope to move my research agenda forward in the coming years. I am particularly excited about the evolving capabilities of geographic information systems (GIS) software to illuminate geographic and spatial relationships among variables. In my opinion this resource has been under-utilized in political science, but particularly in the international relations and comparative politics subfields. I am also interested in fuzzy-set comparative analysis.

While my primary focus has been on Brazil and Foreign Direct Investment, I plan to expand my analysis in the first few years after my dissertation to encompass more of the developing world. Questions about the political economy of development will continue to dominate my research agenda.