FDI and women empowerment in developing countries: does the entry heterogeneity matter?

We examine the effects of foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows on women empowerment disentangling between greenfield FDI (GFDI) and merger and acquisition (M&A) sales in 108 developing economies. The goal is to test whether there are differential effects of GFDI and M&A sales on gender inequality and gender development. To that goal, we have built a data-set (2003–2020) that merges data on Gender Development Index and Gender Inequality Index from the United Nations Development Programme, country economic and institutional indicators from World Development Indicators and World governance indicators, and, data on GFDI and M&A sales from the United Nations conference on Trade and Development. Employing the system GMM estimation technique, we uncover interesting findings. The results indicate that GFDI contributes to gender inequality and has a negative impact on women's welfare in developing countries. In contrast, M&A sales are associated with a reduction in gender inequality and an improvement in women's welfare.