This paper uses detailed, unpublished data on FDI applications, approvals and actual investments, provided by the Cambodian Investment Board (CIB). The original data are company-level data on projects owned by Cambodians and foreigners. Cambodian investments are not taken into consideration. The data are transformed into country-level data and are used in the estimations as the explanatory variables at national levels (such as GDP and country risk). Because certain data, for one or two years, are equal to zero or are missing, we opted for unbalanced panel data sets to measure both approved and realized FDI. Based on the approved FDI projects, there were 32 home countries that have companies with investments in Cambodia during 1995–2005. When the countries are excluded that accounted for only a few projects, the number of home countries included in the analysis is reduced to 17. Yet this smaller group of countries included in the analysis, represents more than 99 per cent of total approved FDI during 1995–2005.
As far as could be verified, no official figures about realized FDI in Cambodia have been made available for Cambodia since then. Therefore, the realized FDI data from CIB, which were classified as ‘‘active’’ and ‘‘former active’’ by the Project Monitoring Department (PMD) of CIB are used. Two more countries (Portugal and Vietnam) had only a few observations for realized FDI between 1995 and 2005 and consequently were dropped from the analysis, which brought down the number of home countries to 15 in the analysis of realized FDI. Yet, they account for practically all (99 per cent) of the total estimated realized FDI in Cambodia during that period. Contrary to previous studies of the determinants of FDI in developed and developing countries, the variables in the present paper are deflated to remove the influence of price changes, except political risk, distance, and a set of dummy variables. ‘‘Push’’ and ‘‘pull’’ factors in both home and host countries are incorporated into the analysis.
When the investors in the home country decide to set up production facilities in a particular host country, they normally will compare the economic, political and institutional factors between the home and potential host countries. Thus, the attractiveness of the business environments in the host countries in which the investors may conduct their business, lies in the differences between the home and host country factors, at least as perceived by the investors. Therefore, explanatory variables in relative terms are used in the analysis. They are from international institutions such as the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, the Asian Development Bank, or other sources such as Euromoney Magazine and Taiwan’s Ministry of Economic Affairs (MOEA). The definitions of the variables and the description of the data as well as their sources can be consulted in the Appendix