An Economic Analysis of Brownfield and Greenfield Industrial Parks Investment Projects: A Case Study of Eastern Slovakia

The implementation of industrial park investment projects in relation to the use of brownfields and greenfields is a constantly debated issue. Brownfields are unused areas, often with devastated building objects and environmental burden that pose potential risks to the investor but also contain the possibility of using the available infrastructure and facilities for the use of the proposed investment project. The objective of the study was to assess the positive and negative investment of these types of sites based on the available information on the possibilities of investing in the implementation of the brownfield industrial park compared to the greenfield in the western part of East Slovak region and to identify a more appropriate alternative of investing. Based on the assessment of investment in the industrial parks, the appropriateness of the allocation of investment capital was assessed through the simple additive weighting (SAW) method. The SAW approach allows us to objectivize the weighting value of selected factors and thus assess the appropriateness of the allocation of investment capital. Based on the results, it is more advantageous to allocate the investment capital to the greenfield as the return on investment of the project expressed as a percentage of the average annual profit was 9.5%, compared to brownfield with only 2.9%.