Determinants of foreign direct investment and volatility in South East Asian economies

Abstract

The objective of this paper is to identify and examine the determinants of barriers to foreign direct investment (FDI) in South East Asian economies. Based on our theoretical groundings, we identify potential barriers under four categories, namely macroeconomic policy factors, political factors, institutional factors and socioeconomic factors. Using cross-sectional time-series data for 17 South East Asian economies from 1996 to 2005, we test these set of barriers against per capita FDI inflows and volatility in FDI inflows using fixed effects pooled regression analysis. In the process, we also check as to how fragile our results are to the small but important changes, which we bring in the conditioning information set using robustness check. Our empirical evidence suggests that all the possible set of barriers identified have significant negative effect on per capita FDI and positive impact on volatility in FDI inflows. We therefore suggest that there is an urgent need to find the solutions to break these barriers that are acting as stumbling blocks in attracting FDI of their actual potential. © 2009 Taylor & Francis.