Investment Strategies and the Plant-Location Decision: Foreign Companies in the United States

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A groundbreaking contribution to the literature of foreign investment, this volume is based on an extensive field study conducted under the auspices of the Tayloe Murphy International Business Studies Center at the University of Virginia. Through in-depth personal interviews with the executives of 20 companies, the author examines the investment strategies and plant-location decisions of foreign corporations in the United States. In addition to identifying the market, cost, and other strategies that influenced the U.S. plant-investment decisions, the author analyzes managerial aspects of the plant-location decision-making process, describes specific location factors considered important by the executives interviewed, and points out salient recent trends in foreign direct investment in the United States. Divided into five parts, the volume begins by defining the objectives of the study and its research methodology. Part 2 examines management strategies, exploring the factors that influenced the investment decisions of the 20 companies in the study and delineating the operational strategies that guided manufacturing operations subsequent to plant start-ups. In Part 3, the author covers the plant location decision-making process, while Part 4 provides a company profile for each of the 20 foreign affiliates under study. The final section summarizes the research findings and presents the author's conclusions. In addition to comparing the present findings with previous work, the author also addresses the implications of his results for business executives, economic development professionals, and government policy makers.