Rick Weddle (Site Selectors Guild): Welcome to Site Selection Matters, where we take a close look at the art and science of site selection decision-making. I’m your host, Rick Weddle, president of Site Selectors Guild. In each episode, we introduce you to leaders in the world of corporate site selection and economic development. We speak with members of the Site Selectors Guild, our economic development partners, and corporate decision-makers to provide you with deep insight into the best and next practices in our profession. In this episode, we have as our guest Courtney Fingar, editor-in-chief of Investment Monitor, a part of New Statesman Media Group, with a mission of explaining how the world is changing for decision-makers in need of data-driven answers. Today, Courtney will talk with us about foreign direct investment or FDI. More specifically, Courtney will share with us about FDI trends and the macro factors driving them. What an interesting and relevant topic for today’s discussion. Join me as we welcome Courtney Fingar to “Site Selection Matters.” Courtney, before we get into the weeds of foreign direct investment or FDI as a topic, take a minute, if you will, and tell us about the “Investment Monitor.”

Courtney Fingar (Investment Monitor): Well, first of all, thanks very much for having me. “Investment Monitor” is a new publication that was launched in September 2020. It’s digital-only, and it’s free to read and access. So, I hope all the listeners will check it out. Our audience that we’re targeting would be senior decision-makers at multinational companies and those who influence their decisions, so that, of course, would include site selection advisors. But, of course, it could be interesting for anyone in the broader FDI ecosystem. We consider ourselves to be data-led. So, we are trying to sort through all the vast amounts of data out there that relate to FDI and help our readers make sense of them. I come to the publication from a relatively long career at Financial Times, formerly running fDi Magazine there, and I’ve been joined at Investment Monitor by about 10 other colleagues from there. And we’re just looking to build something new, and we felt there was a gap in the market that we’re trying to serve.

Rick: Well, that’s great. It sounds like a great opportunity at a really interesting time. You know, 2020 was wow, quite a year as we faced the first global pandemic in at least our lifetimes. One area that was impacted by the pandemic was global investment or FDI hugely. By some estimates, the total of foreign investment fell by over 40% maybe in 2020. Take a minute if you will and help us unpack that fact or data, as you would say, and explain why our listeners should be concerned with it.

Courtney: Yes, it was a highly disruptive year, and the data charts are pretty ugly when we start to look around what happened last year. And it’s arguably the most difficult situation for FDI in decades. And that would even include the big collapses that we saw after the global financial crisis more than a decade ago. Now, the collapse is not uniform. There were some sectors that have continued to perform relatively well, and they are not surprising ones like healthcare and ICT. And a few countries are outliers. We saw increases in China and India, for example. But apart from those few bright spots, we saw declines in every mode of FDI. So, we saw declines