Showing items related by title, author, creator and subject.

• Starting a Foreign Investment across Sectors

  De la Medina Soto, Christian; Ghossein, Tania (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-11)

  The ease of starting a foreign
 investment in various sectors is a relevant consideration
 for investors seeking to establish an investment project
 abroad. Two thematic areas will be analyzed in this paper to
 answer the following questions: Which economies impose
 equity ownership restrictions on foreign investors and which
 procedural barriers do foreign companies face when
 establishing foreign-owned subsidiaries in these economies?
 The analysis is based on findings from the Foreign Direct
 Investment Regulations indicators, which measure 103
 economies, on whether they restrict foreign ownership across
 economic sectors and on the establishment process they
 impose on foreign-owned companies. Nearly 80 percent of the
 economies covered in the Foreign Direct Investment
 Regulations database restrict foreign companies from
 entering in some sectors of their economies. In addition,
 establishing a foreign-owned company takes longer and
 requires more steps than starting a domestically-owned
 company in 94 percent of the economies observed. Overall,
 economies in Eastern Europe and Central Asia and high-income
 OECD economies have fewer equity restrictions on foreign
 ownership than economies in the other regions and require
 the least number of additional procedures of foreign
 companies to establish a subsidiary. The findings are
 significantly correlated with inflows of foreign direct
 investment on a per-capita basis.
• Policy Barriers to International Trade in Services : Evidence from a New Database

  Borchert, Ingo; Mattoo, Aaditya; Gootiiz, Batshur (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-06)

  Surprisingly little is known about policies that affect international trade in services. Previous analyses have focused on policy commitments made by countries in international agreements but these commitments do not in many cases reflect actual policy. This paper describes a new initiative to collect comparable information on services trade policies for 103 countries, across a range of service sectors and the relevant modes of service delivery. The resultant database reveals interesting patterns in policy. Across regions, some of the fastest growing countries in Asia and the oil-rich Gulf states have the most restrictive policies in services, whereas some of the poorest countries are remarkably open. Across sectors, professional and transportation services are among the most protected in both industrial and developing countries, while retail, telecommunications and even finance tend to be more open. An illustrative set of results suggests that trade policies matter for investment flows and access to services. In particular, restrictions on foreign acquisitions, discrimination in licensing, restrictions on the repatriation of earnings and lack of legal recourse all have a significant and sizable negative effect, reducing the expected value of sectoral foreign investment by $2.2 billion over a 7-year period, compared with "open" policy regimes. In terms of access to services, credit as a share of gross domestic product is on average 3.3 percentage points lower in countries with major restrictions on the establishment of foreign banks as compared with those that only impose operational restrictions.
• Financial Globalization in Emerging Countries : Diversification vs. Offshoring

  Ceballos, Francisco; Schmukler, Sergio L.; Didier, Tatiana (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-06-29)

  Financial globalization has gathered
 attention since the early 1990s because of its
 macro-financial implications and growing importance. But
 financial globalization has taken shape via different forms
 over time. This paper examines two important, concurrent
 dimensions of financial globalization: diversification and
 offshoring. The diversification dimension refers to the
 increase in foreign assets and liabilities in
 countries' portfolios. Offshoring is related to the
 reallocation of financial activities to international
 markets. The former focuses on who holds the assets, the
 latter on where transactions take place. The authors find
 that globalization via the diversification channel expanded
 throughout the world during the 2000s, as domestic residents
 invested more abroad and foreigners increased their
 investments at home, generating more cross-border holdings.
 However, financial globalization via offshoring displays
 more mixed patterns, with variations across markets and
 countries. The paper also shows that the nature of financing
 through both diversification and offshoring has improved for
 emerging countries.