The dynamics of United States inward foreign direct investment policy: National security, economic competitiveness, and the politics of structural choice

This study examines the dynamics of U.S. inward foreign direct investment policy. It explores the rise of acquisitions of U.S. companies and assets by foreigners, particularly the Japanese, as a contentious foreign economic policy issue and analyzes the policy shifts in the past two decades that have changed the character of U.S. regulations targeting inward direct investments from that of benign neglect to one of cautious activism driven by the politics of economic competitiveness.;More broadly, this study explores foreign economic policymaking in advanced industrial democracies. By taking a "new institutionalist" approach to analyzing the U.S. inward foreign direct investment policy, this study examines the vital role played by elected policymakers in the foreign economic policymaking process. Indeed, such an approach helps to clarify how the growing conviction among U.S. politicians that economic security is a crucial element of national security and their perception that economic competitiveness is an increasingly important electoral issue have driven the U.S. policy toward incoming direct investments from that of liberal encouragement to that of discretionary restrictions in some sensitive sectors of the domestic economy.