Four Fundamental Factors for Increasing the Host Country Attractiveness of Foreign Direct Investment: An Empirical Study of India

This chapter explores the challenges host countries face when attempting to attract foreign direct investment (FDI), a task made more complicated by protectionist policies and the coronavirus pandemic. This chapter argues that four factors—productive labor, best practice adaptability, cluster competitiveness, and goal-orientation—beyond those traditionally emphasized merit attention. The factors do not stress what countries have, but how they mobilize them. These factors have relevance across countries at different development stages. The study takes India as its primacy case study, but also shows the relevance of the factors in the cases of Malaysia, Thailand, Indonesia, the Philippines, and others.

This piece originally appeared as Hwy-Chang Moon and Wenyan Yin. “Four Fundamental Factors for Increasing the Host Country Attractiveness of Foreign Direct Investment: An Empirical Study of India,” In Krishna B. Misra, ed., Handbook of Advanced Performability Engineering (Cham: Springer, 2021), 299-317. Copyright remains with the original holder.