Foreign Direct Investment, Female Education, Capital Formation, and Economic Growth in Japan and South Korea

The influence of foreign direct investment (FDI) on host country's economic growth is a widely explored issues in the existing economic literature. This study attempts to examine the role of foreign direct investment, capital formation, and expansion of female education on economic growth of Japan during the period 1971-2014, using time series observations. The study further makes a comparison regarding the association with FDI and economic growth with South Korea, another major OECD economy of Asia The study utilises the auto-regressive distributed lag (ARDL) bounds approach to cointegration to examine the long run causality association among the variables. Today, for sustainable economic development the social and institutional policy issues are important. The paper explores one such social issue, namely gender and economic prosperity. This paper has novel contributions in the current research on time series, econometric analysis for the following reasons: (1) it has investigated the relationship between economic growth, foreign direct investment and capital formation in a gendered differential framework (utilising the role of human capital formation among men versus women; (2) the study covers a long period and more recent time period (till 2014), which concurs with the upsurge of world FDI movements and (3) the study also explores the major structural breaks of the two economies and how economic growth is impacted thereof.