Economic Growth in ASEAN-4 Countries: A Panel Data Analysis

This paper examines the impact of economic variables which are foreign direct investment (FDI), openness and gross fixed capital formation to economic growth which indicates using gross domestic product (GDP) over the period 1981- 2008. The impact of variables to GDP is estimated using three panel estimation models which are called pooled model (pooled), fixed effects model (FEM) and random effects model (REM). The findings show that all variables are correlated with each other and also have the positive relationship to GDP. Hence, all variables may lead economic growth boost when they are increase whereas FDI becomes the most efficient variable in order to assist economic growth and followed by openness and gross fixed capital formation. Otherwise, the result in Ordinary Least Squares (OLS) which implies in this study as well test all variables stationary at 5 percent level of significant. These shows only gross fixed capital formation is significant to growth and contributes the positive effect to GDP in each ASEAN-4 countries. However, OLS estimation result for Indonesia shows the other variable has significant to growth which is openness; while it gives the negative affect the GDP. Instead of Indonesia, openness is not significant at other ASEAN-4 countries such as Malaysia, Thailand and Philippines. Besides, other variable is FDI also not significant in the case of all ASEAN-4 countries. It means that, openness does not correlated to growth for Malaysia, Thailand and Philippines countries; while FDI is not correlated to growth for all ASEAN-4 countries in this study.