Improving Russia's Policy on Foreign Direct Investment

Abstract

Foreign direct investment brings host countries capital, productive facilities, and technology transfers as well as employment, new job skills, and management expertise. It is important to the Russian Federation, where incentives for competition are limited and incentives to becoming efficient are blunted by interregional barriers to trade, weak creditor rights, and administrative barriers to new entrants. The authors ague that the old policy paradigm of foreign direct investment (established before World War II and prevalent in the 1950s and 1960s) still governs Russia. In this paradigm there are only two reasons for foreign direct investment: access to inputs for production and access to markets for outputs. Such kinds of foreign direct investment, although beneficial, are often based on generating exports that exploit cheap labor or natural resources, or are aimed at penetrating protected local markets, not necessarily at world standards for price and quality. They contend that Russia should phase out high tariffs and non-tariff protection for the domestic market, most tax preferences for foreign investors (which don't increase foreign direct investment but do reduce fiscal revenues), and many restrictions on foreign investment. They recommend that Russia switch to a modern approach to foreign direct investment by: 1) Amending the newly enacted foreign direct investment law so that it will grant non-discriminatory "national treatment" to foreign investors for both right of establishment, and post-establishment operations, abolish conditions (such as local content restrictions) inconsistent with the World Trade Organization agreement on trade-related investment measures (TRIMs), and make investor-state dispute resolution mechanisms more efficient (giving foreign investors the chance to seek neutral binding international arbitration, for example). 2) Strengthening enforcement of property rights. 3) Simplifying registration procedures for foreign investors, to make them transparent and rules-based. 4) Extending guarantee schemes covering basic non-commercial risks