Economic and Social Research Council
Economic and Social Research Council

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PhD in multinational enterprises location choice and productive investment in middle powers

With Prof. Jun Du and Prof. Peter Buckley

This funded PhD project investigates how multinational enterprises (MNEs) choose between middle power locations for productive investment, and under what conditions the resulting Foreign Direct Investment delivers durable productivity gains.

It sits at the intersection of two complementary research programmes: Peter Buckley and Piyush Kadethankar’s (2026) framework mapping horizontal and vertical interdependence across 35 middle power economies, and Jun Du’s (2026) six-dimension competitiveness diagnostic for trade-dependent advanced economies.

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