On March 12, 2009, the Canadian federal government passed significant amendments to the Investment Canada Act (ICA), Canada's foreign investment law of general application. Though the amendments generally liberalize important aspects of the Canadian foreign investment review regime, they also include a broadly worded national security test that now allows the responsible Minister to review proposed investments in Canada on national security grounds. On July 11, 2009, the government published draft regulations that provide the details of the new national security review process. A detailed summary of the amendments and regulations is included in an extended note available at www.vcc.columbia.edu.
Until the end of 2007, western media, governments and regulators often seemed more concerned about protecting domestic firms from investments by sovereign wealth funds (SWFs) than about attracting capital inflows. Politicians in many countries called for the regulation of sovereign foreign investments at that time, when SWF investments were growing rapidly. In fact, during 2006 and 2007, countries that introduced at least one regulatory change (many of them related to such investments) making the investment climate less welcoming for multinational enterprises accounted for 40% of all FDI inflows.
Topic:
Economics, International Trade and Finance, Foreign Direct Investment, and Sovereign Wealth Funds
Over the past 12 months, large-scale acquisitions of farmland in Africa, Latin America, Central Asia and Southeast Asia have made headlines in a flurry of media reports across the world. Lands that only a short time ago seemed of little outside interest are now being sought by international investors to the tune of hundreds of thousands of hectares.
Topic:
Agriculture, International Trade and Finance, and Foreign Direct Investment
We know several things about foreign investment. First, foreign investment matters, reaching US$1.7 trillion in 2008. Second, we know that foreign investors have new international law rights to protect their economic interests. Third, we know that those rights are now being used.
Topic:
Economics, International Trade and Finance, and Foreign Direct Investment
A crucial challenge to all countries in the current economic crisis is to stimulate investment, including foreign direct investment (FDI). Countries striving to attract FDI often resort to two types of policies: improving infrastructure or lowering taxes, as a means of attracting new FDI, or keeping existing FDI. Indeed, recent empirical studies (e.g. Bénassy-Quéré et al. 2007; Bellak et al. 2009) confirmed that both lower taxes and improved infrastructure exert a considerable influence upon multinational enterprises' decision to invest in a particular country, when controlling for other important location factors (like market size, labor costs etc.).
Topic:
Economics, Infrastructure, and Foreign Direct Investment
In 2008 global FDI fell by around 20%, while outward FDI from China nearly doubled. This disparity is likely to continue in 2009 and 2010 as China invests even more overseas. What is driving this continuing surge in China's outward FDI?
Topic:
International Trade and Finance, Foreign Direct Investment, and Financial Crisis
With some delay, the internationalization of business R is following the globalization of production. Starting on a small scale during the 1970s and 1980s, the emergence of globally distributed R networks of multinational enterprises (MNEs) accelerated rapidly in the 1990s. The “globalization of innovation” was facilitated and driven by a complex set of factors, including changes in trade and investment governance, improved intellectual property rights through TRIPS, the growing ease and falling cost of communicating and traveling around the globe, and the concomitant vertical industry specialization and unbundling of value chains. The growing and sustained level of cross-border M was one major direct driver, often having the effect that merged firms inherited multiple R sites in a number of countries.
Topic:
Development, Economics, and Foreign Direct Investment
Several developed countries have introduced emergency measures to mitigate the effects of the Global Financial Crisis, including Australia, Germany, Ireland, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Although the measures taken are still undergoing changes by the executive branch and are thus a “moving target”, our survey reveals early evidence of differentiation between foreign and domestic actors in the emergency plans adopted by this sample grouping. It is this differentiation that may give rise to liability as breaching guarantees against discrimination of foreign investors under international investment law.
Topic:
Economics, International Trade and Finance, Markets, International Affairs, Foreign Direct Investment, and Financial Crisis
Political Geography:
United States, United Kingdom, Germany, Australia, and Ireland
On December 22, 2008, new regulations setting forth the U.S. government's national security review process for foreign mergers and acquisitions of U.S. businesses became effective. They are the ultimate step in a lengthy effort to revise and strengthen the reviews undertaken by the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (“CFIUS”).
Topic:
Economics, National Security, and Foreign Direct Investment
Basic questions posed in this study were whether the trend of Gulf involvement in the Mediterranean economies was sustainable, what the specifics of those investments are, and could a triangular cooperation be envisaged? What is clear is that Gulf investors have become major players in the Mediterranean with an investment volume of more than 70 billion Euro in nearly 700 projects since January 2003. The Gulf now seems to have joined Europe as a sustainable second investment pillar. The complementarities between needs and resources of Europe, GCC and Med countries call for the implementation of an integrated co-operation model, similar to the Japan-China-ASEAN triangle.
Topic:
Development, Economics, and Foreign Direct Investment