Foreign Direct Investment In Latin America

Examine the changing nature of foreign investments in Latin America!Generously enhanced with easy-to-understand charts, tables, and graphs, this book covers the ins and outs of foreign direct investment in the established and emerging markets of Latin America. In addition to an overview of direct investment for the entire Latin American region in the 1990s, this valuable book examines specific countries’ experiences with FDI in that decade. These include Argentina, Chile, Mexico, Brazil, Peru, Ecuador, Paraguay, Costa Rica, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, and Nicaragua.Spending on environmental projects is on the rise, and Latin American nations are at the forefront of this financial whirlwind in the developing world. Foreign Direct Investment in Latin America: Its Changing Nature at the Turn of the Century examines the difficulties of assessing environmental investments. It analyzes the role of international capital in Latin-American environmental issues and discusses the major players, such as the World Bank, in international capital and the environment.Foreign Direct Investment in Latin America presents case studies that illustrate: the history of FDI in Argentina and the impact of the privatization of state-owned enterprises in 1991-1993 the similarities and differences between 1990s FDI in Mexico and Chile the ways that modern investment in Brazil differs in purpose from investment there in previous economic eras how Peru addressed its balance-of-payments crisis in a time when its domestic financial markets were thin and there existed few sources of financing besides banks how Paraguay’s historical lack of infrastructure has hampered FDI efforts there Ecuador’s financial and balance-of-payments crisis-its currency is in free-fall and its financial institutions are on the brink of collapse . . . and much more!Foreign Direct Investment in Latin America packs all this valuable information into a single user-friendly source. As we move into the new millennium, no student, educator, or investor interested in this quickly evolving, volatile market should be without it!

This workshop proceedings examines foreign direct investment policy and promotion in Latin America.

How can countries in the underdeveloped world position themselves to take best advantage of the positive economic benefits of globalization? One avenue to success is the harnessing of foreign direct investment (FDI) in the “nontraditional” forms of the high-technology and service sectors, where an educated workforce is essential and the spillover effects to other sectors are potentially very beneficial. In this book, Roy Nelson compares efforts in three Latin American countries—Brazil, Chile, and Costa Rica—to attract nontraditional FDI and analyzes the reasons for their relative success or failure. As a further comparison, he uses the successes of FDI promotion in Ireland and Singapore to help refine the analysis. His study shows that two factors, in particular, are critical. First is the government’s autonomy from special interest groups, both domestic and foreign, arising from the level of political security enjoyed by government leaders. The second factor is the government’s ability to learn about prospective investors and the inducements that are most important to them—what he calls “transnational learning capacity.” Nelson draws lessons from his analysis for how governments might develop more effective strategies for attracting nontraditional FDI.

In its latest edition, the Foreign Direct Investment in Latin America and the Caribbean report analyzes in-depth the FDI received by the Caribbean, where these flows are much more significant than in the rest of the region as a proportion of Gross Domestic Product (GDP). The study also examines the impact of FDI on the environment, which has not been measured or regulated sufficiently by countries in the region.

Foreign direct investment has quadrupled over the past decade in Latin America, which today is one of the world's major investment magnets. Yet the question of which foreign investment policies maximize these inflows remains unanswered. Even though the shift to market-oriented economies has liberalized investment policies throughout Latin America, FDI remains concentrated in only a few countries. Foreign Direct Investment in Latin America evaluates the volume of these new FDI inflows, the factors that attracted them, and their contribution to Latin American development. The book analyzes investment decisions in part through a comprehensive survey of businesses that have recently invested in the region. Case studies of FDI flows to Argentina, Chile and Colombia examine the role of foreign investment liberalization, incentives and performance requirements, complementary policies in such areas as macroeconomics, taxation, foreign exchange and trade, and foreign debt conversion programs.