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level differences, as well as volumes of respective activities, spillovers to domestic firms and local starting conditions. Policy inferences from these indicators must be treated with caution. The exercise does not aim at distinguishing between ‘good’, ‘bad’, ‘better’ or ‘worse’ foreign investment in any universal way, but rather to enhance understanding around the complementarity of multinational firms in specific contexts and to support the alignment of their outcomes with national development objectives, however diverse and evolving the latter may be. The “quality” of FDI, if there is such a notion, is ultimately highly idiosyncratic and to a large extent independent from capital _._ The same type of investment will produce different outcomes in different contexts that are more or less desired from a societal, economic and strategic point of view. The policy and strategy package needs to find ways to unlock these opportunities from _all_ incoming foreign investment, by addressing the market and government failures that may be preventing multinational firms from delivering expected gains.

Future work can build on several directions, namely, to validate and improve the information presented herein, and to extend the findings to other relevant domains that are not covered in the analysis. In terms of validation, benchmarking the sample of multinational firms against a wide array of other sources, business census and registers as well as industrial surveys conducted in developing countries, would be necessary to validate the sample. In addition, part of the variation in development outcomes of foreign MNEs is also explained indirectly through other prevalent characteristics of these firms, such as production scale – i.e., the fact that they are larger than domestic firms – or their sectoral concentration, which may not be explicitly controlled for due to data limitations. Additional analysis to validate a number of hypotheses on drivers of development outcomes presented in this report would be warranted. Assessing the extent of _seasonal_ and _sectoral_ influence, which will be possible in future iterations of World Bank Enterprise Surveys, is also essential in order to remove potential biases, improve the quality of information, and unbundle outcomes to what can and cannot be influenced by policy.

Future work can build on several directions to address certain gaps as well. First of all, this study draws on a large and diversified sample of developing economies, with only a few OECD countries represented in the sample. It would be worthwhile to extend these indicators to advanced OECD countries, where premia may well differ considerably, particularly as greater FDI is received from emerging economies with different motivations. In addition to the geographic scope, replicating these patterns over time would allow countries to monitor progress, and assess the impact of specific policy interventions on outcomes. Second, the scope of this work only addresses inward FDI. Future work could focus on differences between domestic multinationals and other domestic firms, highlighting development aspects of outward FDI. Finally, the outcomes assessed relate to economic growth and socio-economic inclusiveness, which are key pillars of development strategies. An extension to environmental outcomes would align the set of indicators more closely to the SDGs and add value to the existing framework.