• Journal of the Economic Geographical Society of Korea
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• v.12 no.4
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• pp.438-453
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• 2009

Attracting advanced foreign enterprises into the less-developed regions has gained increasing importance as a regional development strategy in Korea. This study critically examines the foreign-direct investment-led regional development strategy of Wales, United Kingdom. Despite a high FDI inflow in manufacturing, the Welsh regional economy has suffered from specialization in low-skilled assembly with limited R&D activities, insufficient linkage with local domestic suppliers, and violent fluctuation in local employment in response to changes within the global business environment. This tendency shows that the foreign-invested companies have neither locally embedded themselves enough nor created the external agglomeration economies in the region. At the same time, the Welsh local government's excessive dependence on financial incentives packages to induce multinationals, rather than effort to create regional innovative capacity, has resulted in a sizable fiscal loss, an abused local planning process, and subordination of the local government's major administrative decision-making on foreign investors. The Welsh FDI case suggests that an effective FDI attraction policy should include inter-regional cooperation and coordination in the inward investment attraction procedure, a comprehensive land use planning process, and state-level concrete governance on FDI.

• Journal of the Economic Geographical Society of Korea
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• v.12 no.1
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• pp.67-82
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• 2009

This paper examines the regional economic development policies of the Welsh Development Agency for attracting companies from the perspective of industrial location theory. The Welsh Development Agency has succeeded in attracting domestic or international capital, as a core actor for the regional economic development, and responded to the changing business environment and to the specific and various needs of the investors. The analysis of the Welsh case provides an important theoretical and practical implications. First, the Welsh case shows the importance of the role of the public sectors for the regional economic development. As the behavioral approach and the industrial location theory argue, the attraction of domestic or international capital led to the regional economic development. Second, the effective activities for attracting capital played an important role in the development. The quality and quantity of the information, in the industrial location theory, and the capacity of the business groups, in the behavioral approach, are significant factors of the development. Third, incentives by the Agency are also important. This finding not only supports the classical location model based on the cost and profits, but also the behavioral approach. Finally, the Welsh case could not succeeded in gaining regional economic competitiveness, even though attracting companies, by disregarding the industrial specialization strategy at the local level. This implies that we need to build industrial clusters. In sum, the behavioral approach has significant implications to the understanding of the public policies for attracting companies.