The Australian Public’s Preferences Over Foreign Investment in Agriculture

Abstract

This paper estimates a model of how the Australian public's preferences over foreign investment in agriculture are determined. The results show that the attributes of foreign investment of greatest concern to the public are not the same as those used by the foreign investment approvals regime to flag proposals for scrutiny.

Chinese investment in Australian infrastructure assets: accounting for local public preferences

“…This implies the public prefers an investment more if the foreign company is government-owned rather than privately-owned. This result may appear surprising but is consistent with results of Laurenceson, Burke and Wei (2015) in the context of foreign investment in Australia's agricultural sector, which also failed to find evidence of a negative relationship between local preferences and the ownership type of the foreign investor.…”

“…This implies that, everything else held constant (i.e., the lease length is the same, the investment is from the same country-of-origin, and so on), as the foreign ownership share increases, the public prefers an investment proposal less. The foreign ownership share was also found by Laurenceson, Burke and Wei (2015) to be the most important driver of Australian public preferences towards foreign investment in Australia's agricultural sector and hence appears robust across sectors in which particular sensitivities around foreign ownership are held.…”

“…To shed light on how the Australian public forms preferences, this paper takes a discrete choice experiment (DCE) approach. To the best of the authors' knowledge, Laurenceson, Burke and Wei (2015) were the first to use a DCE to study public preferences over foreign investment. This was undertaken in the context of foreign investment in Australia's agricultural sector and so the results of this earlier study may not be consistent with preference formation around infrastructure.…”

Partnership for Change: Australia–China Joint Economic Report

“…Successive waves of foreign investment in Australia from the United Kingdom, the United States, Japan and now China have all caused community anxieties (Groot 1990 A foreign investment study by UTS researchers in 2015 suggests that the Australian public is more concerned about how large the share of an Australian company being bought by a foreign investor is rather than whether that investor is a state-owned entity or whether the foreign investor is from a particular country -although China is preferred significantly less than the United States or Japan (Laurenceson et al 2015).…”