By Andrei Skvarsky.
Though foreign direct investment was generally in decline worldwide in 2020 because of Covid-19, some countries still received more of it than they had in 2019, and they included tiny Luxembourg, which attracted an equivalent of one-third of FDI attracted by China.
Luxembourg received $62bn as FDI last year. This was 319 per cent up on 2019 and the world’s biggest national year-on-year increase in inward FDIs for 2020, according to a study by the MoneyTransfers.com company based on data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
China attracted $212.5bn, the largest amount received by a country in 2020. It marked was a year-on-year increase of 14 per cent.
MoneyTransfers.com, a firm specialising in information on international money transfer providers, compiled a ranking of 37 nations that were key FDI recipients in 2020.
Luxembourg, a country one and a half times the size of Greater London with a population that stood at about 626,000 in 2020, is fourth on the list.
China holds the top rung, and the United States is second with $177.1bn but this is 37 per cent down on 2019. India is third, having received $64.4bn or 27 per cent more than it attracted the year before.
Austria, Italy, the Netherlands, Norway, Slovakia, Switzerland and Saudi Arabia were excluded from the study as they “experienced negative FDI inflows in 2020 or data for [them] was incomplete/unavailable”, MoneyTransfers.com said in a statement.
Only eight of the 37 countries received larger FDI in 2020 than in 2019. Belgium was second and Sweden third to Luxembourg in that way with 190 and 158 per cent increases respectively.
Twenty-eight countries recorded year-on-year decreases for 2020.
Finland, which attracted $2.6bn, leads this category with a plunge of 81 per cent.
Other countries in this group are the majority of the reviewed EU countries, Russia with a drop of 70 per cent, Brazil (62 per cent), Britain (57 per cent), Canada (50 per cent), Australia (36 per cent), and Japan (29 per cent).
Estonia is the only country in the ranking to attract as much in 2020 – $3.1bn – as it did in 2019.
“Given the worldwide turbulence and economic uncertainty the Covid-19 pandemic caused last year, businesses and entrepreneurs alike were perhaps much more hesitant than ever before about investing outside of their domestic borders,” MoneyTransfers.com said in its statement.
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