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The real impact of the Asian Crisis on the activities of multinational enterprises with investments in Southeast Asia is only now becoming apparent. This article provides some of the first empirical evidence on this issue, stemming from a survey conducted in mid-1999, amongst retail-oriented multinational firms with regional headquarters located in Singapore. The survey confirms the negative impact of the Asian economic crisis on multinational enterprises' regional operations, and indicates the persistence of structural impediments to foreign investment across parts of the region. The gap between the attractions of the ASEAN-5 countries and the Indochina countries, as hosts for foreign investment, is also becoming more pronounced.
I. Introduction
This article examines the effect the recent Asian economic crisis had on the perceptions of multinational enterprises (MNEs) with foreign direct investment (FDI) strategies in the ten countries of the Southeast Asia region.1 The analysis is based primarily on responses to a mail survey that was conducted among retail-oriented manufacturing MNEs (that is, firms engaged in the final stages of production for retail consumer markets) with regional headquarters located in Singapore. Although less than three years have elapsed since the manifest effects of the Asian economic crisis in Thailand in July 1997, the more immediate macro-economic, political and social dimensions of the regional downturn have already been fairly well documented, discussed and analysed. There is already a wealth of commentary on an issue that has seemingly dominated business in Southeast Asia. However, the perspective of some of the key actors2 - the business community itself - remains relatively less well recorded or analysed (World Bank 1999). This survey provides a surgical slice of the population of global multinational firms, and goes some way to addressing this apparent lacunae. As retailoriented corporates, this sample is probably more sensitive than most to the economic downturn in the Southeast Asian markets, and therefore provides a fruitful focus of study and analysis, given that the Asian economic crisis prompted a sharp contraction in consumer demand across most countries in Southeast Asia (Bartels and Freeman 1999).
It is not our intention to depict the Asian economic crisis here, as that has already been more than adequately done by numerous authors (Godement 1999; Delhaise 1998; Jackson 1999). Suffice it to say, Southeast...