Relative Importance of Plant Location Factors: A Cross National Comparison Between Singapore and Malaysia

The strategic implications of plant location in the global context of supply chain management have received limited attention in the literature. Both quantitative factors (transport costs, exchange rates, labor rates, and taxes) and qualitative factors (infrastructure, availability of skilled labor) have been identified as being important in making plant location decisions. Few studies have offered prescriptive models that isolate the relative influence of strategic factors in locating in one country as opposed to another. In this paper, logistic regression analysis is used to predict which strategic location factors are significant for firms locating in Singapore in comparison to firms that locate in Malaysia.