Abstract：Since 1960s, Investment climate has become a new field in regional science. Investment climate is a conception which contains comprehensive connotations. The paper concludes all the existing definitions of the investment climate and pointes out its firm theoretical foundation including the regional distribution theory of labor, location theory, theories of regional economics and sustainable theory. In this paper, the progress of the investment climate theory and research method in the recent 30 years is reviewed(three stages and corresponding achievements of the Investment climate research abroad are pointed out), and six important fields in the domestic investment climate research are discussed:①the theoretical foundation of the Investment climate, the proposal of the conception and the discussion of its connotations and extensions; ②the evaluation of regional and urban investment climate from the investment and regional perspective separately, with an aim at the character of the region or city; ③the evaluation theory and methods of the investment climate including the evaluation method of the key factors, analyzing method of parameters, modern mathematic analysis method and GIS; ④the indicator system of evaluation of the investment climate including its contents and establishment principles; ⑤the evaluation of the industry investment climate and the contrast analysis of the different industrial investment climate in different regions; ⑥the system of the investment climate as a subject, the systematic establishment of the subject and the discussion of its relationship with other subjects. Based on this, the author points out five issues in the research, which are, the system of the investment climate is not established and the research of the investment climate theory is poor; object-oriented evaluation of the investment climate is insufficient and the evaluation aimed at different industries, objects and items need to be done; the scarcity of performance evaluation for investment climate and the evaluation aimed at the performance of the investment climate building need to be done; different criteria of evaluation and difficult to realize the share of the resources, and lots of static research but lack of dynamic research. For the more, it proposes further studies are expected to be done in some fields, such as, Reevaluation of investment climate, object-oriented evaluation of the investment climate, the sustainable investment climate, the investment climate information system, the industrialization of the investment climate, and so on.
