ABSTRACT
This conclusion presents some closing thoughts on the concepts covered in the preceding chapters of this book. The book analyses the survival of the plants, which is crucial issue in the regional development literature. Indeed, of the foreign-owned start-up plants arriving in the North-East region since the mid-1980s, a fifth exited by the year 2000, taking with them a prospective 7,500 jobs. A start-up plant is found to have a lifetime of about 14 years, but there is relatively little variation in this about the median survival duration. Foreign direct investment (FDI) is the process whereby a firm in one country provides capital to an existing or newly-created firm in another country. FDI occurs across national boundaries, but, rather strangely, empirical studies on the location pattern of Multinational Enterprise (MNE) plants tend to be at the national level, using regional or firm-level data for a single country.
