A political-macroeconomic model is developed to explain why small differences in fiscal decentralization may ultimately lead to dramatically di¤erent economic policies toward FDI hence starkly different amount of FDI flows into two otherwise identical developing countries. Too much fiscal decentralization hurts incentives of the central government while too little fiscal decentralization renders the local governments captured by the protectionist special interest group. Moreover, the local government's preference for FDI can be endogenously polarized and sensitive to fiscal decentralization. Calibration and counterfactual experiments results support fiscal decentralization as the major reason for China and India's nine-fold difference in FDI per capita.