The Key Success Factors for Attracting Foreign Investment in the Post-Epidemic Era

• Published in: Axioms
• Main Authors: Sun-Weng Huang, James J. H. Liou, Shih-Hsiung Cheng, William Tang, Jessica C. Y. Ma, Gwo-Hshiung Tzeng
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: MDPI AG 2021-06-01
• Subjects: key success factors; foreign investment; post-epidemic era; COVID-19; fuzzy Delphi; DEMATEL
• Online Access: https://www.mdpi.com/2075-1680/10/3/140

The global economy has been hit by the unexpected COVID-19 outbreak, and foreign investment has been seen as one of the most important tools to boost the economy. However, in the highly uncertain post-epidemic era, determining how to attract foreign investment is the key to revitalizing the economy. What are the important factors for governments to attract investment, and how to improve them? This will be an important decision in the post-epidemic era. Therefore, this study develops a novel decision-making model to explore the key factors in attracting foreign investment. The model first uses fuzzy Delphi to explore the key factors of attracting foreign investment in the post-epidemic era, and then uses DEMATEL to construct the causal relationships among these factors. To overcome the uncertainty of various information sources and inconsistent messages from decision-makers, this study combined neutrosophic set theory to conduct quantitative analysis. The results of the study show that the model is suitable for analyzing the key factors of investment attraction in the post-epidemic period. Based on the results of the study, we also propose strategies that will help the relevant policy-making departments to understand the root causes of the problem and to formulate appropriate investment strategies in advance. In addition, the model is also used for comparative analysis, which reveals that this novel approach can integrate more incomplete information and present expert opinions in a more objective way.