Chinese Foreign Direct Investment in sub-Sahara Africa

[Krautrock]

Dear all,

I was sneaking through this forum in order to solve one of multiple problems in discovering patterns of Chinese Foreign Direct Investments (FDI) towards sub-Sahara Africa and am now interested in your opinions, thoughts, comments and yes help on my research question. Basically, I want to find out if Chinese FDI are strongly resource driven and do not care about country characteristics like corruption or human rights.

Towards this end I found country-level FDI data ranging from 2003 to 2010 (last 2 years cannot be used due to changing definitions)
My dependent variable is FDI normalized by GDP of respective host countries.

The independent variables are among others: ln (log) GDP, ln population, corruption index, human rights, secondary school enrollment, Openness, income per capita, freight costs (to parent), exchange-rate volatility, ratio of exports of raw materials to total exports

As the FDI data is left censored I have to use a TOBIT I model. (right?)
In some papers I found similar regressions using a random effects (re) model, whereas regarding the data structure I would prefer a fixed effects model (right?)
Also a vector autoregression seems to fit the data but because of the limited annual observations I would loose further years (right?)

Thank you for your effort in advance
I am looking forward to receive your comments

regards
Krautrock[/b]