Date of Award

Spring 5-7-2017

Degree Type


Degree Name

Executive Doctorate in Business (EDB)



First Advisor

Danny N. Bellenger

Second Advisor

Karen Diane Loch

Third Advisor

Felix Rioja


Investment decision making has always been one of the most important fields to explore in business. Even when approaches to decision making vary by time and region, and sometimes are more intuitive than rational, new technologies and a better access to worldwide information encourage business people to make decisions based on systematically obtained information. In the era of information, when we usually have a data surplus more than a lack of it, building new theoretical frameworks that cluster the main factors that investors should consider before making an investment overseas is highly valuable for companies.

This analysis contributes with a new investment decision-making approach that includes traditional economic and political factors, but enhances the analysis with demographic elements that should be considered. Through a statistical analysis built on reliable public information, this research elaborates on the most important demographic factors to consider when investing in industrialized, emerging, and frontier countries.

Whereas many times investment decisions respond to short-term initiatives and the performance of a specific industry is imperative, other times investors are looking for a long-term business that requires more variables to be considered in a broader analysis; in both cases demographics could become essential.

This study explores the following main research question: Do demographics enhance our ability to explain and predict foreign investment attractiveness? The full results and analysis will be delivered throughout the text, but as can be seen in advance, “Trade” is an outstanding variable with a steady positive contribution to explain foreign investment, and it is permanently present in the developed and frontiers clusters. Regarding the demographic variables, “Age dependency” was a constant and one of the most important negative factors to explain foreign investment in Developed and Advanced Emerging countries. In general terms, we can state that negative demographic factors are usually those that can help to better explain foreign investment, whereas positive demographic indicators represent a lower contribution. Meanwhile, economics constantly presented a positive contribution.