Trade and Sustainable Development Symposium

With ongoing slow global economic growth, countries continue to work on the levers of dynamic growth and sustainable development. A key strategy is to focus on attracting and facilitating foreign investment inflows in order to enhance a country's participation and movement along global value chains (GVCs), an approach expected to not only create more jobs, but better jobs, and growth. Over the last decades however, despite attracting record amounts of foreign direct investment before 2007, in most cases, developing countries have found that the investments attracted were either short-term, or had failed to generate sufficient spillovers and backward linkages, resulting in a local private sector that was not competitive enough to participate and upgrade along additional global value chains. Given such a trend, this session will seek to contribute to a better understanding of why developing countries struggle to increase, retain, and benefit from the investments attracted. How should policies and frameworks be adapted to not only increase investments, but to facilitate the flow of sustainable investments? This session, leveraging the momentum of recent discussions taking place at the WTO and the G20 on investment, aims to explore options for additional international coordination, for the purpose of increasing global flows in sustainable investments. 

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