Using data on Foreign Portfolio Investment (FPI), we find a positive relationship between higher tax burden and OECD residents’ tax evasion, especially via tax havens. Contrary to established investor preference for certain country characteristics, we find they are less important to tax evaders who value privacy and want to remain undetected by their home tax authorities. We find very limited evidence that OECD Tax Information Exchange Agreements (TIEAS) reduce tax evasion, controlling for other determinants of overall OECD FPI. Without the US in the OECD sample, tax havens play a lesser role and OECD policies appear to make a marginal impact.

The positive direct and indirect spillover effects of foreign direct investment on growth are often case specific and not necessarily uniform nor easily predicted. Effects of FDI due to international investment policy changes are often confounded by free trade and customs union agreements that occur simultaneously because trade may be a complement to or substitute for FDI. We review the effects of regional trade agreements on FDI and focus on the new Eurasian Economic Union (EAEU). With annual data from 1995 to 2019 for post-Soviet countries, three members, the Russian Federation, Belarus, and Kazakhstan and nine non-members, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Georgia, Kyrgyz Republic, Moldova, Tajikistan, Turkmenistan, Ukraine, and Uzbekistan, we estimate the EAEU integration effect on country FDI flows, post-2010. We control for other determinants, including infrastructure development, natural resource rents, potentially confounding trade flows, the financial crisis, sanctions against Russia and country fixed effects. The formation of the EAEU did not stimulate FDI and while GDP grew it was not associated with higher FDI. Further growth opportunities via FDI lie with relationships with countries outside the EAEU.

We identify new country characteristics that influence cross‐border equity flows: income inequality, autocracy, and sovereign wealth funds. Using 149 source countries and 34 Organisation for Economic Co‐operation and Development (OECD) host countries for 2002–2013, we find that OECD host countries receive higher foreign portfolio investment (FPI) inflows from source countries with high income inequality and source countries with a sovereign wealth fund, but lower inflows from autocratic source countries. We argue that concentrated wealth in a society, overseas investments for the benefit of future generations, and political regimes influence FPI. These variables have been understudied though they provide valuable indicators for policy makers and investors. We supplement our core analysis with realistic interactions between these new variables and with the increasing importance of tax havens. Our results hold throughout a variety of robustness checks.

We modify the Gali and Monacelli small open economy dynamic stochastic general equilibrium (DSGE) model, calibrate to Mexican data and simulate the impact of the financial crisis on Mexico, under floating and counter factual fixed exchange rates. The floating exchange rate ameliorates welfare losses for Mexico. They are greater under fixed exchange rates because the return paths to equilibrium are more volatile (higher variance) and output, consumption and employment impulse response functions (IRFs) overshoot. Monetary policy, inflation targeting with floating exchange rates, clearly reduced the welfare costs vis‐à‐vis other counter factual policies including consumer price index‐based Taylor rule, domestic inflation Taylor rule and fixed exchange rates.