What’s Happening on Investment Facilitation: A survey of recent global developments
Though investment protection and liberalization have been a regular feature of IIAs, these have to be complemented with promotion and facilitation at the local level to ensure that host economies are marketed well enough to attract investments and that regulatory and administrative barriers faced by investors in their day-to-day operations are addressed and minimized. To ensure that their economies are competitive, countries have been autonomously developing and implementing facilitation measures locally for some time. However, there currently is no universally accepted definition of what investment facilitation entails, and no multilateral framework governing investment facilitation has taken shape. Despite these difficulties, investment facilitation is increasingly emerging as an essential area for international cooperation and policy-making. Accordingly, this article surveys recent developments in investment facilitation policy-making at the international level. After giving a brief history of efforts in investment facilitation rulemaking at the bilateral and regional levels, it concludes with a section that recalls efforts by G20 members to create rules on investment facilitation and provides an overview of the recently concluded negotiations among a group of WTO members on an investment facilitation agreement.