Investment promotion in the South African manufacturing industry: incentive comparisons with Malaysia and Singapore

Abstract

South Africa needs to increase its inward foreign direct investment in order to achieve economic growth. The purpose of this article is to explore which intervention could be launched in the short term to enhance the country's attractiveness for foreign investors. The findings of the literature review demonstrated that incentives, as a determinant of investment, are the short-term intervention with the most significant potential to attract additional foreign direct investment. A comparative study, which provided insight into the incentives that are currently offered to the manufacturing sectors of three countries (South Africa, Malaysia and Singapore), assisted in identifying two additional incentives that the South African government could introduce and three existing incentives that could be amended. The introduction or modification of these incentives could ensure that South Africa has a competitive advantage to attract investment from foreign investors and thereby increase South Africa's inward foreign direct investment in the manufacturing industry.

Emerging Market Global Players: The Case of Brazil, China and South Africa

“…Over the previous two-and-a-half decades, the South African government has adopted a wide range of domestic policies [73] and executed diverse measures to lure foreign investment and support domestic entities, particularly small to medium enterprises, to participate in foreign markets. The implemented measures include, inter alia [74][75][76]: the formation of capable institutions, negotiating and participating in foreign investment treaties, the provision of tax incentives, streamlining of access to capital, and the establishment of administrative support agencies and incubators. This has seen OFDI generated by South African EMNEs expanding, mostly noticeable in sectors such as retail, construction, mobile telecommunications and banking [16,20,77].…”

An Investigation of the Dynamic Effect of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) and Interest Rates on GDP in South Africa

“…This is a major problem because this will leave the South African economy in a stagnant state and could harm the economy by even decreasing the current growth rate. It is considered that the country has the potential to attract investment with the significant benefits from it (Wentzel & Steyn, 2014). It should be noted that the country has a number of stumbling blocks that affect FDI such as political instability, infrastructure capacity issues, shortages in highly skilled labour, high levels of crime, exchange controls, restrictive labour regulations and low economic growth (Tuomi, 2009;Lundahl & Petersson, 2013).…”

The model of investment promotion policy scheme in science and technology park: a case study of technopolis in Indonesia

“…The book of 'Handbook for Promoting Foreign Direct Investment in Medium-Size, Low-Budget Cities in Emerging Markets' (VALE COLUMBIA CENTER, 2009) elaborates that framework of investment promotion scheme can be attained through several processes which are strategy formulation, organizing the institution, marketing and advertising activity, investor targeting, investment facilitating, and aftercare and advocate of policy. Furthermore, investment promotion has some approaches which incentive providing, monetary and fiscal policy, e-commerce strategy and location provision for industries (Wentzel & Steyn, 2014), (Nielsen, Asmussen, & Weatherall, 2017).…”