Finance, Competitiveness, and Innovation in Focus

2020-09-01, Sabha, Yassin, Hamden, Mouna, Heilbron, Armando

After the Arab Spring, Tunisia urgently needed to create productive jobs and economic opportunities for its young population. Attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) in priority sectors was a key pillar of the Government’s strategy to deliver this job agenda. With the support of the World Bank Group, the Investment Promotion Agency of Tunisia engaged in proactive outreach campaigns which resulted in 21 investment leads and three announced FDI projects, including a manufacturing plant by Japan’s Sumitomo. This case study shows that well-planned and executed investor outreach campaigns can lead to concrete investment results and contribute to a country’s development objectives. It provides key success factors useful to other countries wanting to engage in outreach. More than ever before (in a post-COVID-19 world), outreach can play a key role for countries in their efforts to reposition and take advantage of new investment opportunities from near shoring and emerging sectors. The paper provides examples of IPAs continuing their outreach efforts virtually by leveraging technology.

2020-03, Heilbron, Armando, Aranda-Larrey, Yago

Research shows that investment promotion agencies (IPAs) may be the best public institutions to meet government objectives for attracting, establishing, retaining, expanding, and linking productive private investment. As part of this, IPAs need to provide relevant, high-quality services to investors at different stages of the investment life cycle. Informed by its research and experience in global operations, the World Bank Group introduces the Comprehensive Investor Services Framework (CISF), a catalog of specific services to meet investor needs. IPAs can use this investor-centric framework to design service offerings in line with their strategic focus and promotion capacity.

2019-12-31, Heilbron, Armando, Whyte, Robert

A well-functioning institutional framework can result in higher levels of foreign direct investment. It requires several factors such as a shared strategic vision, solid institutions capable of delivering on their specific mandates and collaborating beyond their walls, and a strong political and financial support for all. The note describes key government functions for investment, suggests a process and principles for creating optimal institutional structures to deliver them, and provides examples. In particular, it examines the role of investment promotion agencies (IPAs) the agency usually tasked with operationalizing government FDI goals as well as the dilemmas that governments face in the context of institutional specialization versus function consolidation.