Abstract
Since the 1980s, foreign investment flows from developed regions to developing countries have steadily increased. Asian countries, particularly the four Asian dragons (Hong Kong, Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea) have been key recipients of FDI. In recent years, more developing countries in the Asia Pacific region have sought to attract FDI to improve their economies and countries such as Vietnam and Myanmar have enacted considerable political and economic reforms to assure foreign investors of more effective infrastructure facilities and governance. The pandemic has constricted the flow of FDI to the region as foreign investors have become more attuned to the vulnerability of countries in successfully managing public health crises. As most Asian economies are dependent on FDI, changes in how country risk is assessed post COVID-19 will affect their attractiveness to foreign investors. Therefore, our research, which proposes a new risk measure based on the pandemic, is timely, relevant, and contributes to the scholarly understanding of investor behavior and international finance.
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Notes
- 1.
This study follows a similar sampling as in Sharma et al.’s (2021) study. In their study, they use a mixed sampling frequency (i.e., daily and annual data) in their analysis.
- 2.
Sharma et al. (2021) studied the role of governance and healthcare infrastructure in COVID-19. The authors faced the same limitation where the data on healthcare and FDI inflow from World Bank were not available for the year 2020.
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Lee, L.M.Q., Yang, IC.M., Watabe, M. (2022). FDI in the Era of the Pandemic: Public Health as a New Country Risk Measure. In: Kwok, A.O.J., Watabe, M., Koh, S.G. (eds) COVID-19 and the Evolving Business Environment in Asia. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-19-2749-2_5
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