Proceedings of Annual Tokyo Business Research Conference
9 - 10 November 2015, Shinjuku Washington Hotel, Tokyo, Japan, ISBN: 978-1-922069-88-7
Determinants of the Foreign Direct Investment in East Asia
Behrooz Gharleghi1, Aduldech Klong Klaew2, Tan Hui Min3 and Benjamin Chan Yin
Fah4
The purpose of this study is to identify the major challenges towards inward foreign direct
investment in Thailand by examining some critical factors. According to the UNCTAD World
Investment Report 2013, Thailand was among the 8 priority destinations for foreign investment
for the period of 2013-2015, gaining 4th place in the previous year. As a result, Thailand is an
important destination of Foreign Direct Investment. Thailand has always been referred to as a
developing country which has been successful in pursuing an export-led growth strategy
(Brimble, 2002). Although, Thailand is one of the best country to invest on the business by
foreigners, at the same time there are still some factors that may challenge the foreign investors
such as management of Thai’s government, complexity of commercial law in the country and
the problem of marketing system in Thailand. A quantitative research approach is carried out to
identify the significance of the above factors toward inward FDI. Self-administrated
questionnaire distributed through convenient non-probability random sampling method to collect
the data for above challenges and finally 197 usable questionnaire out of 220 is utilized to
obtain the results. Reliability test, Pearson correlation test, and regression analysis were
implemented to identify the relationship among these variables. The results indicate that poor
management as well as complexity of commercial law are the major challenges faced by
investors. While marketing system found to be insignificant.
Keywords: Poor Management, Commercial law complexity, FDI, Marketing system
__________________________________________________________________________
1
Asia Pacific University of Technology and Innovation, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. behrooz@apu.edu.my
2
Asia Pacific University of Technology and Innovation, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia.Aduldech_1991@yahoo.com
3
Asia Pacific University of Technology and Innovation, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. Viviantan_90@hotmail.com
4
Asia Pacific University of Technology and Innovation, Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia. benjamin@apu.edu.my