Impact of economic freedom, piracy losses, and intellectual property rights on foreign direct investment: evidence from mena countries

This paper assesses the impact of economic freedom, piracy losses, intellectual property rights on Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in the MENA region. For this purpose, panel data analysis was conducted for a set of 11 countries over a period of 18 years ranging from 1996 to 2013. Considering FDI as the dependant variable and piracy losses, investment freedom, and property rights indexes as measures of economic freedom and intellectual property rights, the results of the analysis revealed that the fixed-effects panel model is the best suited model, and that piracy losses have a positive significant impact on FDI, while investment freedom and property rights are negatively related to FDI and insignificant.