Macroeconomic and Institutional Conditions Shaping MNE Entry‑mode Selection in Southeast Asia

Cross-border investment in Southeast Asia takes place across economies with different institutional, economic, demographic, technological, environmental, and legal conditions. This study develops an exploratory Composite PESTEL Entry-Mode Index (PEI) for Singapore, Malaysia, Thailand, Vietnam, Indonesia, and the Philippines and explains how such a country-level screening measure may inform, but cannot determine, multinational enterprises’ entry-mode decisions. The proposed framework combines PESTEL with Dunning’s Ownership–Location–Internalization paradigm and transaction cost economics. This paper reported 1–10 dimension scores are treated as provisional researcher-coded values because the underlying indicator-level observations, normalization outputs, and source-year mapping are not yet fully documented. Accordingly, the reported country rankings are exploratory and should not be interpreted as validated or predictive results until the PEI is recalculated using the reproducible protocol specified. Corporate evidence is audited against company filings and official disclosures. The available evidence supports a distinction between controlled local subsidiaries and outsourced contract manufacturing, but it does not establish that national PEI scores cause firms to choose particular entry modes. The paper therefore offers a transparent screening framework and a research protocol for subsequent empirical validation, rather than claiming to identify universally optimal entry modes.