China moves the G20 toward an international investment framework and investment facilitation

Abstract

China is increasingly concerned with protecting its outward foreign direct investment, facilitating the operations of its firms abroad and creating a strong international investment law and policy regime. After briefly reviewing the emergence of China as an outward investor and some policy issues associated with this rise, this chapter reviews a few issues central to the future of the international investment law and policy regime. It then comments on several outcomes that were achieved — or initiated under — China’s G20 leadership: non-binding “Guiding Principles for Global Investment Policymaking” that could eventually form the basis of a universal framework on international investment; the Importance of investment facilitation, leading perhaps to an international support program for sustainable investment facilitation, beginning possibly with “Guiding Principles for Global Investment Facilitation”; and the creation of an additional intergovernmental platform that allows for a continued systematic intergovernmental process to discuss the range of issues related to the governance of international investment, preferably paralleled by an informal, inclusive and result-oriented consensus-building process that takes place outside intergovernmental settings.