Impact of Regulation Distance on International Market Selection of Chinese Construction Companies

International market selection is the basic decision of multinational companies to enter the international market. In the field of general investment, the institutional distance between host country and home country will reduce the tendency to invest in the international market. As one of the three pillars of institutional distance, regulation distance attracted full attention of researchers. In the construction industry, only a few scholars have studied on the selection of international contract market. Their research seldom focused on institution distance, and no one has studied the impact of regulation distance. In this paper, the empirical study is used to probe the influence of regulation distance on the international market selection of Chinese construction companies. A single factor logistic regression model and a multi-factor logistic regression model including several control variables are established. A model only containing the control variables are also used for comparison. The results show that regulation distance has negative effect on the international market entry for Chinese construction companies significantly. That is, as the regulation distance between target market and China increases, the possibility of entering the market will be reduced. To some extent, our research can make up for the loophole of the application of institutional theory in international project contracting. The result of our study can provide reference for the international market choice of Chinese construction companies.