刊行物

内容紹介

This paper investigates the determinants of the regional distribution of Japan’s MNCs in Asian manufacturing. First, it provides a detailed review of the voluminous, recent literature and selected surveys on related subjects. This review suggests that host economy size, labor costs (adjusted to account for the influences of productivity and labor quality), and agglomeration of Japanese investors were among the most important factors influencing the locations chosen by Japanese MNCs. Evidence regarding a wide range of other potential determinants was more mixed however. An index of investment attractiveness was then constructed from a large number of relevant components and used to rank 10 East Asian hosts to Japan’s manufacturing MNCs in a baseline and 11 alternative scenarios. The baseline and alternative scenarios all revealed three distinct groups of host economies, three most favorable (China, Singapore, Hong Kong), four intermediate (Malaysia, Taiwan, Korea, Thailand), and three least favorable (Indonesia, Vietnam, Philippines) locations. Rankings of the economies within each group differed somewhat depending on the scenario considered, however. This index approach is an important supplement to the existing literature because it allows one to simultaneously examine the influence of a large number of potential determents and to explicitly consider investor heterogeneity in greater detail than many other methodologies.