Worldwide increasing demand for agricultural products poses the critical question of where this additional production will take place. In this context, the phenomenon of large scale Foreign Land Acquisition (FLA) is one strategy that has been controversially discussed in scientific and public debates. A better understanding of what factors drive FLA-flows between investor and target countries is still needed. This project applies a gravity model to estimate the effect of agro-environmental determinants in target countries. The response variables are derived from improved data obtained from the Land Matrix Global Observatory and the explanatory variables from a range of climatic and agricultural data sets. The issue of large numbers of zero flows in such a data set is tackled using zero-inflating regression models. Overall the results highlight the crucial role of water resources, in particular the potential of rainfed crop production in the targeted areas, and not just land abundance alone as found in previous studies. Moreover, in line with previous studies, we show that in contrast to other types of investment flows, agricultural investment flows are not negatively affected by weaker institutional regulations or corruption.

中文翻译：

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水资源作为外国直接土地投资的决定因素——外国土地征用的重力分析

全球对农产品日益增长的需求提出了这一额外生产将在哪里进行的关键问题。在这种背景下，大规模外国土地征用 (FLA) 现象是一种在科学和公共辩论中引起争议的策略。仍然需要更好地了解推动投资者和目标国家之间 FLA 流动的因素。该项目应用重力模型来估计目标国家农业环境决定因素的影响。响应变量源自 Land Matrix 全球观测站的改进数据以及一系列气候和农业数据集的解释变量。使用零膨胀回归模型来解决此类数据集中大量零流量的问题。总体而言，结果突出了水资源的关键作用，特别是目标地区雨育作物生产的潜力，而不仅仅是先前研究中发现的土地丰度。此外，与之前的研究一致，我们表明，与其他类型的投资流动相比，农业投资流动不会受到较弱的制度监管或腐败的负面影响。