<article>
  <front>
    <journal-meta>
      <journal-title-group>
        <journal-title>Elsevier Science B.V. All rights reserved.
P I I S</journal-title>
      </journal-title-group>
    </journal-meta>
    <article-meta>
      <title-group>
        <article-title>How does foreign direct investment affect economic 1 growth? E. Borenszteina ,*, J. De Gregoriob, J-W. Leec</article-title>
      </title-group>
      <contrib-group>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>E. Borensztein</string-name>
          <email>eborensztein@imf.org</email>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="0">0</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>J. De Gregorio</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="2">2</xref>
        </contrib>
        <contrib contrib-type="author">
          <string-name>J-W. Lee</string-name>
          <xref ref-type="aff" rid="3">3</xref>
        </contrib>
        <aff id="0">
          <label>0</label>
          <institution>International Monetary Fund, Research Department</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Washington DC 20431</addr-line>
          <country country="US">USA</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="1">
          <label>1</label>
          <institution>We are grateful for comments from Robert Barro</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Elhanan Helpman, Boyan Jovanovic, Mohsin Khan, Se-Jik Kim, Donald Mathieson, Sergio Rebelo, Jeffrey Sachs</addr-line>
          ,
          <institution>Peter Wickham, and two anonymous referees. Comments by participants in seminars at 1995 World Congress of the Econometric Society, Korean Macroeconomics Workshop, Kobe University, and Osaka University were very helpful. This paper was partially prepared while Jose ́ de Gregorio and Jong-Wha Lee were at the Research Department, International Monetary Fund. Any opinions expressed are only those of the</institution>
        </aff>
        <aff id="2">
          <label>2</label>
          <institution>Center for Applied Economics, Department of Industrial Engineering, Universidad de Chile</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Santiago</addr-line>
          ,
          <country country="CL">Chile</country>
        </aff>
        <aff id="3">
          <label>3</label>
          <institution>Economics Department, Korea University and NBER</institution>
          ,
          <addr-line>Seoul 136 -701</addr-line>
          <country country="KR">Korea</country>
        </aff>
      </contrib-group>
      <abstract>
        <p>We test the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) on economic growth in a cross-country regression framework, utilizing data on FDI flows from industrial countries to 69 developing countries over the last two decades. Our results suggest that FDI is an important vehicle for the transfer of technology, contributing relatively more to growth than domestic investment. However, the higher productivity of FDI holds only when the host country has a minimum threshold stock of human capital. Thus, FDI contributes to economic growth only when a sufficient absorptive capability of the advanced technologies is available in the host economy. 1998 Elsevier Science B.V.</p>
      </abstract>
      <kwd-group>
        <kwd>Foreign direct investment</kwd>
        <kwd>Economic growth</kwd>
        <kwd>Cross-country regression framework</kwd>
        <kwd>Developing countries</kwd>
      </kwd-group>
      <volume>0</volume>
      <issue>0</issue>
      <fpage>115</fpage>
      <lpage>135</lpage>
      <pub-date>
        <year>1998</year>
      </pub-date>
      <history>
        <date date-type="accepted">
          <day>20</day>
          <month>5</month>
          <year>1997</year>
        </date>
        <date date-type="received">
          <day>21</day>
          <month>2</month>
          <year>1996</year>
        </date>
        <date date-type="revised">
          <day>24</day>
          <month>2</month>
          <year>1997</year>
        </date>
      </history>
    </article-meta>
  </front>
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</article>

fo = open('The international law on foreign investment.cermxml')
doc = etree.parse(fo)
## TRY 1
doc.find('abstract') # This yields nothing

## TRY 2
path_result = doc.xpath('//abstract') ## Returns empty list

## TRY 3
root = doc.getroot()
result = root.iter('abstract') # This yeilds <lxml.etree.ElementDepthFirstIterator at 0x7f1f71c15a20>
## Dont know what to do ahead. Printing in loop doesn't work

## TRY 4
for child in root[0][1]:
    print(child.tag)
## Abstract tag is child of article-meta[0] which in turn is a child of main parent tag. Hence [0][1]
## This should ideally give abstract as one of its child - but it does not.

<body>
    <sec id="1">
      <title>1. Introduction</title>
      <p>Technology diffusion plays a central role in the process of economic
    development.2 In contrast to the traditional growth framework, where technological
    change was left as an unexplained residual, the recent growth literature has
    highlighted the dependence of growth rates on the state of domestic technology
    relative to that of the rest of the world. Thus, growth rates in developing countries
    are, in part, explained by a ‘catch-up’ process in the level of technology. In a
    typical model of technology diffusion, the rate of economic growth of a backward
    country depends on the extent of adoption and implementation of new
    technologies that are already in use in leading countries.</p>
<p>The paper is divided into four sections. Section 2 presents a simple model to
motivate our empirical investigation; Section 3 provides an account of the data
used in the empirical analysis; Section 4 describes the regression results, and
Section 5 presents some concluding remarks.</p>
     </sec>
 <sec id="2">... </sec>
</body>

>>> d = etree.parse(open('...'))  # file with your exact content
>>> e = d.getroot()
>>> e.xpath('.//abstract')
[<Element abstract at 0x7f9239c10710>]
>>> e.xpath('.//abstract/p')[0].text  # first p inside abstract
'We test the effect of foreign direct investment (FDI) ...'

from bs4 import BeautifulSoup

soup = BeautifulSoup(xmla)
print (soup.find('abstract'))

>>> '<abstract>haha</abstract>'

import os
import lxml.etree as et

def get_article_abstract(article_file, tag_path_elements=None):
    """
    :param article_file: the xml file for a single article
    :param tag_path_elements: xpath search results of the location in the article's XML tree
    :param article_file: individual local PLOS XML article
    :return: plain-text string of content in abstract
    """
    if tag_path_elements is None:
        tag_path_elements = ("/",
                             "article",
                             "front",
                             "article-meta",
                             "abstract")

    article_tree = et.parse(article_file)
    article_root = article_tree.getroot()
    tag_location = '/'.join(tag_path_elements)
    abstract = article_root.xpath(tag_location)
    abstract_text = et.tostring(abstract[0], encoding='unicode', method='text')

    # clean up text: rem white space, new line marks, blank lines
    abstract_text = abstract_text.strip().replace('  ', '')
    abstract_text = os.linesep.join([s for s in abstract_text.splitlines() if s])

    return print(abstract_text)