A Regional Level Hierarchy of the Main Foreign Direct Investments’ Determinants – Empirical Study, the Case of Romanian Manufacturing Sector

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has become in the last 15 to 20 years one of the most important factors that fueled the development of economies passing through transition processes (former communist economies from the east of Europe). As the specialists agree and the literature states it is undoubted that the advantages brought in the destination regions by Foreign Direct Investments are significant and therefore attracting these investments should become one of the main tasks of local authorities.Because of the high importance of the subject, we believe that providing a clear description of the main determinants of Foreign Direct Investments from the manufacturing sector, at regional level, for the Romanian development regions is of crucial importance in the current economical environment. Moreover, we believe that constructing the output of our research as a dichotomous list of strengths and weaknesses for each region might prove of real help for the interested local authorities today when the administrative reorganization of Romania is one of the hottest topics at national level. The analysis process conducted for this research paper was performed in SPSS software package using a sample of 235 firms that met five predefined criteria.