Centro de Documentación e Información Mtro. Jesús Silva Herzog CEDI - Tendencias y desarrollo de la Inversión Extranjera Directa. OECD

Tendencias y desarrollo de la Inversión Extranjera Directa. OECD

Instituto de Investigaciones Económicas, UNAM
Centro de Documentación e Información
Programa de Servicios de Bancos de Información

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© Victor Medina

21/06/2007 - Foreign direct investment (FDI) into OECD countries in 2006 reached its highest level since 2000 and the near-term outlook for FDI remains strong, buoyed by high corporate profits, low interest rates and robust macroeconomic growth. A new OECD report, Trends and Recent Developments in Foreign Direct Investment, forecasts FDI in its 30 member countries to increase by a further 20% in 2007.
Inward FDI rose 22% to USD 910 billion in 2006, up from USD 747 billion in 2005 and USD 491 billion in 2004, according to the latest estimates from the OECD.

The United States was by far the world’s largest recipient of FDI in 2006, attracting USD 184 billion from OECD countries. This is the largest amount of direct investment in the US economy since 2001, in part due to a decline in the exchange rate value of the US dollar. Most of this FDI went into takeovers of existing firms, while greenfield investment accounted for just USD 14 billion.

FDI in 2006 was lifted by a small number of very large cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&As). The biggest five such transactions, valued at close to USD 120 billion, involved takeovers in the UK service sector (USD 54 billion), Canadian mining (USD 34 billion) and the Luxembourg steel industry (USD 32 billion).

France, Greece, Iceland, Poland, Slovak Republic, Switzerland and Turkey also recorded their highest-ever FDI inflows in 2006. These records to some extent reflect cross-border takeovers, but to a greater extent represent additional investment by foreign companies that were there already.

The report is available on the OECD’s website at http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/62/43/38818788.pdf and will be included as a chapter in the upcoming annual publication OECD International Investment Perspectives, due out in September 2007.