This paper aims to investigate FDI attractive factors, which are important to formulate policies to attract Korean direct investment into Vietnam. Based on the literature review and the results of interview with 27 Korean investors in Vietnam, we determined the model of variables attracting Korea’s FDI into Vietnam. It is used to assess the impact of attractive factors belonging to three groups of variables to support investment decision; they are macroeconomics variables (including market size factor, labor cost factor, and market openness factor), policies variables (including monetary policy factor and tax rate gap factor), and microeconomics variables (geographic advantage factor representative by location). This research also utilized a relatively new quantitative research method based on the Autoregressive Distributed Lag model (ARDL) with the time data chain from 1995 to 2017 of Korean FDI into Vietnam. It analyzes long-term relationships between dependent variables and independent variables. The result of this study indicates that there are three positive factors (low wages, trade openness and government policy) explaining the FDI flows in the long term. The result also shows that incentive tax policy has had a positive impact on Korean FDI, which has satisfied the aim of seeking efficiency of Korean investors.

Intra-industry trade (IIT) has played an important role in international trade of Vietnam as a result of rapid growth of the country. This article investigates the level of IIT between Vietnam and 11 trading partners in Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) over the period 2000- 2014. Although there have been a large number of empirical researches contributed to the determinants of IIT, most of them only pay attention on developed countries where the trade flows are similar due to similar demand structure and production technology. Until now, there is no study on intra-industry trade between Vietnam and countries in TPP that Vietnam recently signed a trade agreement in early 2016. IIT is measured by the Grubel–Lloyd index. The index shows that the extent of intra-industry trade between Vietnam and the trading countries is not high due to the level of economic development and the market size. The determinants of IIT are examined using a panel regression model. In the empirical analysis, the results indicate that Vietnam’s intra-industry trade is positively correlated with country size, while it is negatively correlated with income dissimilarity, the trade openness, and geographical distance. This study contributes to the new theoretical trade theory on the evidence of developing country’s IIT.