An empirical examination on the effect of international data transfer security on foreign direct investments in the context of institutional political determinants

The purpose of this study is to analyze what extent having a legal regulation on data transfer and its security and also being considered as an adequate country by the EU in terms of data security, which can be counted among the institutional-political determinants and whose importance has become understandable recently, affect foreign direct investments for the determined 65 countries. In this study the panel data analysis method was used for the annual data of 2010-2020 period. The difference of this study from existing studies in the literature is that the relationship between these two indicators and FDI has not been empirically analyzed yet. In this study; in addition to economic parameters such as national income per capita, foreign trade volume, exchange rate, inflation rate; institutional-political factors such as population growth rate, rule of law, effectiveness of government policies, existence of laws regarding the security of international data transfer and adequate country status in ensuring data security in the EU, nine different variables were used. Indicators such as "the existence of laws regarding the security of international data transfer" and "being an adequate country in satisfying data security in the EU" were modeled separately to investigate whether there is a relationship between the mentioned indicators and FDI and, if so, the relative magnitude of the relationship. In the first part of the study, prepared in four parts, the concept of FDI, its types and the theories explaining FDI; in the second part, the movements of global FDI in the world and Turkey and the economic and institutional determinants, most effective on FDI inflows and most studied in the literature; in the third part of the study, the definition of data, international data transfer and the importance of legal regulations regarding data transfer security; the last and fourth part of this study was completed by including the empirical studies literature on institutional indicators and by giving the results of the analysis to determine the effect of "having individual legislation on data transfer" and "having EU adequate country status in in satisfying data security " on FDI. In the conclusion section, a general evaluation of this study was made and by this study an attempt was made to contribute to the literature gap in this field and as a source that can be referred to those interested in the subject.