해외직접투자규모의 결정에 영향을 미치는 요인

Foreign direct investments of Korean enterprises have sharply increased in recent years. This research is motivated to identify empirically the influence of firm-specific characters and environmental factors on FDI activities of Korean multinational enterprises. Data has been collected through the firms listed in the Korea Stock Exchange and the Kosdag. Among them, 221 companies are proved to perform FDI activities until the year of 1998, which is the latest information on the individual firm’s FDI activity for the present. The balance of individual firm’s FDI amount per country transformed by natural logarithm is used as a dependent variable. Most favorite countries of Korean firms in FDI are the United States followed by China, Indonesia, Germany, Japan, United Kingdom, Thailand, Netherlands, Hongkong China, and India. Samsung Electronics is the leading company in FDI whose balance of investment is 1,645 million dollars in 1998. Other multinationals among the leading group are LG Electronics, Hynix Semiconductor, POSCO, SK Telecom, SK, Hyundae Motors, and Samsung Corporation. As independent variables, 13 factors are used. First, three firm specific characters have been employed, which are firm size, research activity measured through R&D expenditure divided by sales volume, and promotion activity measured with the ratio of promotion expenditure divided by sales volume. Additionally, ten environmental variables are also used as independent variables. Those are mean tariff rate, length of tax holidays, top marginal corporate tax rate, withholding tax rate, labor cost per worker in manufacturing, GDP, consumer price index, percentage of credit extended to private sector, share of labor force whose wages are set by centralized collective bargaining, and corruption perception index.