Abstract

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) inflow to Africa has unevenly distributed investment location choices of multinational enterprises because of some exogenous economic factors associated with the locations, which vary across countries in Africa. The data used in the paper comes from Financial Times, World Bank, African Development Bank. This paper investigated what determines the location choice of FDI inflow to Africa using data on 3,768 firms from 88 countries making location choices in 54 African countries using a multicategory logistic regression. The findings show that: (1) the natural resource seeking enterprises invest more in landlocked countries relative to manufacturing and tertiary sector; (2) the natural resource seeking firms are less concerned about local market size and location’s economic condition comparing to manufacturing and service industries; (3) despite the accusation against the multinational enterprises (MNEs) for exploiting Africa’s natural resources, most of the MNEs choose locations with a large market size and better economic development; (4) the MNEs from developed economies prefer the location with a large market size and a better-developed economy comparing to those from the developing economies.

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