New Delhi: A study by Pew Research Centre has found that 62 per cent of Indians were in favour of foreign companies building factories in their country, while only 43 per cent of those surveyed were in favour of foreign companies buying domestic firms.
The study was done in 2019 by the non-partisan, non-advocacy research group in which 15 countries were surveyed, including India, and a majority of the participants were supportive of foreign companies building factories in their own countries, but were wary of foreign companies buying domestic firms.
The findings of the study were published on 10 August.
The interviews in India were conducted face-to-face in Assamese, Bengali, Gujarati, Hindi, Kannada, Malayalam, Marathi, Oriya, Tamil, Telugu. The sample size in India was over 2,400 and the interviews were conducted from 24 June to 2 October last year.
Besides India, the study surveyed people from countries such as Nigeria, Tunisia, South Korea, Kenya, Lebanon, Brazil, Argentina, Japan, Israel, Mexico, South Africa, Turkey, Philippines and Indonesia.
The study was conducted among 18,451 respondents across 15 countries from 18 May to 2 October 2019. While in 13 out of the 15 countries, people were surveyed face-to-face, in two countries (Japan and South Korea), the interviews took place via telephone.
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Other findings
An overall 72 per cent participants in the study said it’s a good thing for foreign companies to build factories in their native countries, while 26 per cent said it’s a bad thing.
In comparison, a median of 40 per cent people in the study said it was a good thing when foreign entities bought domestic firms, but 58 per cent considered it to be a bad thing.
The survey stated that participants were significantly more supportive of foreign companies building factories in the native countries than them buying domestic firms.
Across 15 countries surveyed in 2019, a median of 72% of adults said it is a good thing when foreign companies build factories in their nation, while 26% said it is a bad thinghttps://t.co/p0OBWIiz9c pic.twitter.com/6WXNcVwJJO
— Pew Research Global (@pewglobal) August 24, 2020
The last time the Pew undertook a study on people’s outlook on these two types of foreign direct investment (FDI) was in 2014.
According to the United Nations, the global spread of coronavirus would lead to as much as a 40 per cent decrease in foreign direct investment this year.
FDI ‘all the more necessary’ under current times
Speaking to ThePrint, economist and a fellow at the National Institute of Public Finance and Policy Radhika Pandey said that after the Covid-19 pandemic, more people would be in favour of foreign companies coming and setting up factories as there is lack of employment and output has gone down.
She further explained that the current policy environment was anyway more liberal to foreign investment, with the government even inviting foreign companies.
“Prime Minister Narendra Modi even spoke about the same in his Independence Day speech this year, where he listed out a number of reform measures undertaken by the government, which resulted in a record Foreign Direct Investment in the country last year,” she added.
“At this point, it is all the more necessary,” she said.
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