Insights

Foreign Direct Investment enables locations, regions and countries to diversify and upgrade their industrial manufacturing, service output and achieve a rapid growth of exports. Attracting FDI is a complex process consisting of many elements. One way of looking at it is to divide it into three segments: Macro – Government inputs Mid-range – activities of […]

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As many countries and regions seek to promote their economic development, their governments establish agencies to promote trade and investment, often focussing on attracting foreign direct investment to the country or region. These agencies can be wholly publicly funded, or a mixture of private and public funding, and may involve cooperation, formal or informal with […]

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Policy makers supporting socio-economic development of their country must formulate medium-long term strategies that identify binding constraints to international competiveness and growth as well as formulate a package of sequenced public programs to address them. Private-public policy councils have proved to be a very useful tool in developing countries that have successfully closed the income […]

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Global and regional markets for foreign investment are now significantly more competitive than ever before. It is critical for any location that aspires to attract (and retain) new foreign investment to ensure that its investment promotion arrangements are coherent and effective, ensuring that the different participating agencies complement each other, capitalize on any synergies, and […]

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This is a major question for almost every country, region and city on the planet.  FDI influencing and attraction is a highly competitive global activity, undertaken by countless central and regional governments, departments, cities, agencies & consultants, all with the legitimate aim of enhancing the economic wellbeing of local citizens.   Let me clearly state […]

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Developing-country stakeholders should proactively engage in the definition of environmental standards in industrialized countries, which may affect their competitiveness, rather than just adapt to them once they are on the market[1].   Awareness of the impact of trade on climate change is here to stay. The concern of the effects of carbon embedded in the […]

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Working with an noncompetitive industrial sector which is home market focused poses many challenges for a country’s industrial development policies and investment promotion agency. There can be several factors causing a lack of export development including poor product design and engineering, production inefficiencies, poor cost competitiveness, logistics issues, skills, high input costs, finance, government regulations […]

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In a previous opinion piece we spoke about the renewed focus on the development of sound enterprise policies by Governments around the world after a period in which the philosophy of “the market knows best” generally held sway. Major world economies such as those in the Eurozone are now saddled with the debts of failed […]

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One important function carried out by successful Investment Promotion Agencies (IPAs) around the world is that of continually monitoring and evaluating their investment promotion strategies.  There is not much point in having a strategy if it is not monitored and evaluated during its implementation. The truism “what gets measured gets done” does apply in practice. […]

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Agriculture and international transport account for a significant share of green-house gas emissions and these sectors are likely to be affected by climate-change related requirements in industrialized countries. Given that Latin America is an important provider of agro-food products (36% of US agricultural imports in 2014), measuring and reducing the carbon footprint of products (embedded […]

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