Paper Title
Theoretical Perspectives Of Foreign Direct Investments And Their Implication On Economic Growth

Abstract
The world economic growth and development has shifted from being controlled by the so-called developed nations to an era where both developed and developing economies share a taste of the pie. Particularly the BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China and South Africa) nations have been some of the critical recipients of this globalisation of markets and production. The globalisation of markets has also resulted in South Africa’s Multinational Corporations (MNCs) investing directly in foreign markets to produce or market products, called Foreign Direct Investment (FDI). The past 30-35 years has since been showing steady increase in both the flow and the stock of FDI. The average annual outflow FDI (OFDI) has increased from US $25 million in 1975 to US $1.6 trillion by 2012 (Hill, 2014). By 2012, the global OFDI stock was valued at US $21 trillion and more than US $27.9 trillion in global sales was cross-border trade in goods and services (Hill, 2014). FDI has indeed been a driving force behind global economic growth. The aim of this paper is to review the theoretical framework of FDI, hypothesis development,mathematical processing and conceptual model development and specification. Sub-sections covered in this paper are related totheories of FDI, justification of the variables and hypothesis development, model specification and a table explaining how variables of the study were measured.Based on theoretical grounding, the initial findings revealed that, although FDI decisions may sound to be easy to make, the existing literature suggests that, MNCs need to consider certain factors before an endeavour to a foreign economy is made. Dunning (1988) suggests a comprehensive framework, which stress that a decision to enter a foreign market is influenced by ownership advantages of the firm, location advantages of the market, and internalisation advantages of integrating transactions within the firm. Hill (2014) proposes the framework in figure 8 in the next page that consists of a set of questions to assist firms in deciding on FDI. Keywords - Brics, FDI, MNCs, OFDI, theoretical framework