Potential Investment Facilitation Agreement: Possible Scenarios and Their Impact on Countries’ Regulations

To attract and retain foreign direct investment (FDI), it is critical that governments have policies and regulations in place that are predictable, consistent, transparent and efficient. While traditional approaches focused on increasing the legal protection and market access offered to foreign investors, often in the form of trade and investment treaties, more recent approaches focus on investment facilitation. A group of members of the World Trade Organization (WTO) entered into “Structured Discussions” with the aim of establishing a multilateral investment facilitation framework (IFF). Investment facilitation refers to actions taken by governments designed to maximise the effectiveness and efficiency of its administrative frameworks through all stages of the investment cycle. Given the lack of empirical studies on the scope and effects of an IFF, this papers introduces the Investment Facilitation Index (IFI) which quantifies the current level of practice in investment facilitation as a basis to assess the economic and trade impact of investment facilitation measures. The IFI indicators cover the full spectrum of investment procedures for nearly 70 countries across income levels, geographical regions and development stages. The IFI will allow users to compare country performance across the different facilitation indicators, to discover the key measures driving the performance of a selected country, and to simulate the effects of potential policy reforms.