Hadi Keshavarz

INTRODUCTION Various factors affect the level of employment in a country. One of these factors is foreign direct investment (FDI), which has found a unique role in the economy of countries in recent decades. Like many countries, Iran faces a lack of investment resources to boost production, create employment, and achieve sustainable growth and development. Therefore, examining whether a foreign direct investment, as one of the critical factors providing investment financial resources, can play an influential role in increasing production and employment in the country can be very important in planning economic growth and development in the country. The impact of investment at the national and regional levels can be different. One of these reasons is the existence of regional differences. Another reason can be seen in inter-regional communications and inter-regional spillovers. Based on this, a region can affect its surrounding regions. Therefore, changing a variable (attracting foreign direct investment) can have both intra-regional effects (changes in employment within the region) and inter-regional effects (changes in employment in surrounding areas). For this reason, it is necessary to consider interregional connections and spillovers in various studies, primarily regional studies. Different views have been mentioned regarding the effect of foreign direct investment on employment at the regional level. For example, Rang et al. (2020) state that different regions have different labor markets in terms of structure and performance and even flexibility. Therefore, the entry of the same capital into different regions can have different effects on the production and employment of these regions. Also, based on the point of view of inter-regional spillovers, a region can affect its surrounding regions. Therefore, the entry of foreign direct investment into a region can have spillover effects on other regions. Therefore, it can be said that a region may not attract foreign