At a time of continuing financial crisis in Asia, the question of the appropriate policies for recovery and for future sustainable development is paramount. One area of particular importance is the treatment of foreign investors. Foreign direct investment (FDI) has played a leading role in many...

Reports on trends in international direct investment tend to focus on recent developments. While such information is clearly of most relevance for policymakers and others interested in the pace and scale of globalisation, it fails to provide any perspective on the nature of globalisation itself....

As more and more countries seek to liberalise their foreign investment regimes to attract global flows of foreign direct investment (FDI), an essential question for policy-makers is no longer just what to reform but also how to reform. How is a reformist government to sell the idea of reform to...

Government-controlled investors, including state-owned enterprises and sovereign wealth funds, have greatly expanded their international activities in recent years. This paper describes the existing policy landscape of international investments by government-controlled investors under both...

The present document surveys the issues related to transparency and third party participation in investor-state dispute settlement procedures. Section I examines the way in which the current rules apply to these issues. Section II describes the steps taken to improve the transparency of the...

In the wake of the Balkan crisis, the Central and East European transition countries have been put into two groups, the seven South-East European countries (SEEC-7) and the five Central European countries (CEEC-5). SEEC-7 have not only been more immediately affected by the crisis but also show...

Bribery is becoming a high priority public concern and the legal framework and enforcement apparatus used in the fight against it are being developed in the OECD and elsewhere. Reflecting these civic and legal pressures, firms now often deal with bribery in their codes of corporate conduct –...

International, bilateral and regional agreements have proliferated in the last ten years to twenty years and new ones are still being negotiated. It is thus virtually certain that for some more time to come international investment disciplines will continue to co-exist side by side with...

Bilateral and regional investment agreements have proliferated in the last decade and new ones are still being negotiated. Most-Favoured-Nation (MFN) clauses link investment agreements by ensuring that the parties to one treaty provide treatment no less favourable than the treatment they provide...