Abstract
The role of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) outflow has become significant and
essential for sustainable economic growth in Southeast Asia region particularly
Singapore. The saturation of the domestic resources accumulation and as export-led
regime, the government of Singapore introduced the regionalization policy in the
1990s to encourage abroad investment. Due to that, this study aims to investigate the
determinants of Singapore FDI outflows from the perspective of selected
macroeconomics variables namely income, trade openness, interest rate and exchange
rate. This study adopted the Johansen and Juselius cointegration test and Granger
causality based on vector error correction model to investigate the annually data from
1975 to 2007. Empirical results indicated that FDI outflow of Singapore is positively
associated with income while inverse linkage with trade openness, interest rate and
exchange rate in the long run. Moreover, exchange rate has the tendency to have
greater influence towards the FDI outflow of Singapore in relative to the other
determinants. Meanwhile, income, trade openness and interest rate portrayed causality
linkage towards FDI outflow of Singapore, except for exchange rate in the short run.
The continuous commitment towards economic integration in the East Asia region via
the Free Trade Area has further contributed to the expansion of FDI outflow of
Singapore in the future.