Our paper uses statistical tools with the aim of empirically investigating the institutional determinants of foreign direct in- vestments (FDI) in Romania. The analysis is focused on the public policies that are relevant from the FDI perspective between 2002 and 2012; more specifically, we direct our approach towards identifying the manner in which state controlled instruments can be employed in order to increase the country’s performance in terms of attracting FDI. The variables we use are the inflows of FDI to Romania, on one hand, and the set of Worldwide Governance Indicators of the World Bank on the other hand.