Public data openness has emerged as a significant institutional policy instrument across the ASEAN+3 region (Bernot et al., 2024), yet its economic consequences — particularly its relationship to foreign direct investment attraction — remain poorly understood in comparative terms across the grouping's highly heterogeneous member economies. This paper presents an integrative thematic review of the literature connecting public data openness, institutional quality, and FDI attraction, with explicit reference to the diverse institutional, regulatory, and developmental contexts of the 13 economies comprising ASEAN+3. Drawing on evidence from information economics, international finance, institutional economics, digital governance, and economic geography, the review synthesizes findings across five analytical dimensions: the theoretical foundations of data openness as an economic intervention; the relationship between institutional quality, business environment, and FDI attraction; the role of technological innovation and digital infrastructure in conditioning investment behavior; the moderating influence of intellectual property protection and data governance coherence on investor confidence; and the spatial heterogeneity and cross-national spillover dynamics that characterize the regional investment effects of data openness reforms. The synthesis finds that public data openness influences FDI attraction primarily through two mechanisms — business environment improvement and technological innovation stimulation — which are systematically conditioned by institutional quality, digital infrastructure depth, intellectual property protection strength, and private-sector absorptive capacity. These conditioning variables differ substantially across the ASEAN+3 grouping, generating correspondingly heterogeneous investment effects that range from full dual-channel activation in advanced economies to highly conditional and threshold-dependent effects in lower-income ASEAN members. Spatial analysis further reveals that data openness generates positive investment externalities for regionally connected partner economies, elevating the policy importance of regional data governance harmonization and digital integration cooperation. The paper concludes with differentiated policy recommendations for governments across the ASEAN+3 institutional spectrum and identifies priority directions for future empirical research, including cross-national quantitative examination of the data openness–FDI relationship beyond the currently dominant Chinese subnational evidence base.
Atento et al. (Thu,) studied this question.
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