Territorial effects of foreign direct investment in developing countries: the case of Ghana

The concept of climate change has become increasingly important in recent years. The most developed countries with the improvement of economic conditions and the opening of new production plants have been more exposed to the increase in greenhouse gas emissions into the atmosphere. In recent decades, national and international attention to climate issues has grown. As a result of greater involvement, agreements have been created between states or rules at national level on maximum permitted emission levels to try to reverse the trend and reduce pollutants in the atmosphere. One of the consequences for companies subject to greater environmental restrictions in developed countries has been the relocation of production sites to developing countries where very often regulation is less stringent. This has led to an increase in foreign direct investment, foreign investment in developing countries. From these movements the pollution haven hypothesis was born. This assumption implies the creation of pollution havens in developing countries in which the largest amount of emissions is due to foreign companies. The objective of this thesis is to find the link between foreign direct investments and the externalities of pollution and trying to confirm or deny the pollution haven hypothesis for a specific state: Ghana. The focus is to study foreign firms in the country, understand the evolution in the number of companies and see whether the CO2 and CO emissions are affected by this evolution. To achieve this goal I used different software. The first was ArcGis Pro that allowed me to geolocate and graphically represent foreign companies. Also on this software I entered the data regarding emissions. To find these data I used the NASA earth science data website, more specifically the Giovanni database that is a Web-based tool that offers a straightforward and user-friendly approach to explore, analyze, and retrieve enormous volumes of Earth science remote sensing data. I downloaded the information on CO and CO2 in GEOTiff, a special format file that contains also geographical information. The goal of the work on ArcGis was to build attribute tables, tables that for each point taken as a sample on the territory would store the coordinates of the point, the number of companies and the level of emission at that particular point. Once these tables were created thanks to the STATA IC software I was able to rework them and perform regression analysis to detect any correlations between the variables of our interest.