Dear Colleagues,

UNCTAD has just released a special issue of its Investment Policy Monitor exploring investment laws around the world.

For many countries investments laws are a core policy instrument to promote and regulate investment. Together with international investment agreements (IIAs), they constitute the basic legal framework for cross-border investment in many countries. Often, these laws and IIAs contain similar provisions.

UNCTAD research finds that at least 108 countries have an investment law as a core instrument to govern investment, almost all of which are either a developing country or an economy in transition. Even though investment laws generally share the same objectives, their content and overall approaches differ significantly.

Key findings from this study include:

• Most investment laws have investment promotion as their main objective, while only a few also deal with investment facilitation.
• Sustainable development is an explicit goal only in a small minority of them.
• Investment laws tend to show an imbalance between the coverage of investor rights and obligations.
• Investment laws often cover the same issues as IIAs and more than half of the laws provide access to international arbitration.

The importance of investment laws calls for a deeper analysis of their content and their coherence with other investment-related policies and international investment treaties.

For more details on these and other findings I invite you to download the Special Issue of the Investment Policy Monitor here.

James X. Zhan
Director, Investment & Enterprise
United Nations Conference on Trade & Development
http://investmentpolicyhub.unctad.org
http://www.worldinvestmentreport.org/ (World Investment Reports) ____
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