A more targeted approach to foreign direct investment: the establishment of screening systems on national security grounds

Abstract

The process of liberalization of international trade and of Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) has constituted a broadly accepted trend during the last few decades and FDI inflows have expanded constantly since the end of the 1980’s. However, signs of a certain crisis of the positive and one-way attitude towards international trade and FDI exist nowadays. The increase in the flux of FDI coming from developing and emerging countries to developed economies, the sudden relevance of foreign sovereign investors, the changing environment for national security or the quest to protect technologies and sectors of the economy considered vital for the host country, its sovereignty and competitiveness are creating a new reality that impacts on both, the global fluxes of FDI and its regulation. Tension exists between the commitment towards freedom of FDI and the right of the state to ensure that certain legitimate public interests and goals can be fully implemented. This may lead to the protection of certain strategic sectors of the economy of the country or flagship firms from foreign investment on national security or related grounds. The current revision of the great paradigms on which FDI, and its legal framework, stand is ascertainable in the growing recourse by states to the development of some measures devoted to prevent the entrance of FDI in the country under certain circumstances.