Nowadays, economic investment and environmental health are two of the most debated topics all over the world. Although they seem to belong to different realities, they are actually strictly related and, for some extent, they depend on each other. The aim of this paper is to gather and analyze the most important ideas, theories and empirical contributions of that part of literature related to FDI, environmental stringency and the relationship between the two. Today, a huge amount of scientific material investigating on these topics is available but it is accompanied by a great degree of ambiguity and confusion, due to the dispersion of information and the disagreement among the different theoretical hypothesis and empirical evidence.