What attracts foreign companies to invest in Poland?

Dr Agnieszka Chidlow is a Lecturer at Staffordshire University. Her research interests lie in the areas of the internationalisation of firms, location choices of multinational companies and methodological issues of international business.

This book represents one of the first attempts to empirically analyse the motives determining the inflow of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) in Poland at both the national and the regional level. It is based on primary data from an on-line questionnaire and includes two empirical analyses. First, the importance of a set of host country location- specific factors is analysed based on a sample of 93 multinational companies (MNCs) which engaged in FDI activities in the Polish market. Second, drawing upon three strands of the literature, and using a sample of 91 MNCs, the spatial distribution of FDI in Poland at the regional level is examined. The results demonstrate that the choice of Poland as a location for FDI by MNCs seems to be linked to the traditional factors which relate to the market attractiveness of the host country. Moreover, the findings confirm that Polish regions do indeed differ substantially in attracting foreign capital and that regional characteristics are significant in the selection of primary location choice within Poland.