IS VIETNAM THE NEW ASIAN TIGER? SCOREBOARD AND MACROECONOMIC EVALUATION OF THE ATTRACTIVENESS FOR FOREIGN DIRECT INVESTMENT

Year 2012, Volume: 4 Issue: 2, 175 - 184, 01.12.2012

Nathalie Homlong Elisabeth Springler

Abstract

Following economies like China and India, also Vietnam has managed to increase
its attractiveness for foreign direct investments in recent years. In contrast to
many European economies Vietnam had overcome the financial and economic
crisis in 2008 quickly and turned back to high growth rates already in 2010/11.
Nevertheless many European economies and companies still regard Vietnam as an
unstable and fragile economy. Therefore the questions arise which general
investment conditions are of importance for companies that are investing abroad,
and which factors make Vietnam attractive as a business location for foreign
companies? After a presentation of stylized facts about Vietnam and a discussion
of location theories and location factors, we develop a scoring method to evaluate
general investment conditions. Eight of the member states of the European Union
in Central and Eastern Europe are used as reference groups to test the scoreboard
rating tool, before it is applied for Vietnam

Keywords

FDI, Vietnam, country evaluation, macroeconomics

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