Mapping Foreign Direct Investment in UK Regions: The Role of Environmental Determinism and Dynamism

Abstract

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and its agents, i.e. Multinational Corporations (MNCs), are understood to play a major role in the economic development of nations through their impact on trade and their ability to generate jobs and to produce new knowledge through technological and managerial advances (UNCTC, 2003). This article maps economic activities of MNCs in United Kingdom and presents an empirical formulation of investors' decision-making. A McFadden's conditional logit model was incorporated to test for the model's predictions, based on location decisions of 6348 plants in UK's counties for 2004. Estimation results suggest that firms' choices can be modelled in terms of economic factors prevailing locally.

Keywords: UK Regions, subsidiaries, environmental determinism, location choice

JEL Classification: F23, L20, R10