As a result of mounting balance-of-trade surpluses for Germany and Japan with the United States by the 1970s, the US federal government exerted pressure on Germany and Japan to decrease the countries’ trade surpluses. Private German and Japanese firms stepped in to accommodate the wishes of their own and the US governments, although they did so in different ways. There has been a recognisable pattern to Japanese foreign direct investment (FDI) in the post-war period, one with its roots in culture and in the history of Japan’s relationship with the target country for the firms’ investments. And there is a distinctly German one, too. The same has been true of the countries’ FDI in the People’s Republic of China since the late 1970s. Relocation of expensive labour-intensive production has formed one strand of this, cultivation of new markets another, and concern for protection of intellectual property related to the design and production of goods a third important strand. German firms have often done better at cultivating the new Chinese market and cooperating with Chinese producers than Japanese companies for a variety of reasons, not least because of animosities arising from before 1945.

Foreign direct investment (FDI) inflows can lead to more opportunities for women in the job market but may also exacerbate gender disparities. While gender mainstreaming in trade agreements has been extensively discussed over the past few years, demonstrating the need for reform, the discussion on gender mainstreaming in investment treaties is incipient, although extremely interesting. The inclusion of gender provisions in investment treaties is one of the pillars for a successful strategy to overcome gender inequality. It needs to be addressed along with gender policies by multinational enterprises (MNEs) leading the foreign investment process. This chapter aims to address the role of women as levers of change and the opportunity for MNEs to be the drivers of this change. To this end, it reviews the recent evolution of gender provisions in investment agreements and demonstrates how FDI can foment much-needed change by providing examples of actions and policies by MNEs in the Americas towards promoting more opportunities for women.

With the adoption of the ASEAN Charter in 2008, the ASEAN member states articulated their vision of an economic community. This ambitious vision tracks economic reality around ASEAN. The ASEAN region has recently been one of the most popular destinations for FDI across the globe. Despite a temporary decline due to the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020, the region’s share of global FDI rose from 11.9 percent to 13.7 percent that year. Against this auspicious background, this book calls for a new framework through which we can conceptually embrace the ontological autonomy of the ASEAN Investment Regime (AIR), beyond an aggregation of the interests of its individual member states. A sociology-led approach, especially constructivism, emphasizes ideational factors, such as culture and norms, that guide state actions from within. The main goal of the book is to explore the manner in which ASEAN’s history and culture has fundamentally shaped its foreign investment policies, leading to outcomes that often depart from the external structure and script of Global Investment Law.

This chapter explores the theme of innovation and IP use in the mining industry by providing a foreign direct investment (FDI) angle. It highlights the role of mining multinational enterprises (MNEs), both as main actors of international production and in their links with host countries’ government and social and economic context. The development implications of FDI spillovers seem critical in the mining industry where the bulk of investment takes place in developing countries, often the least developed countries. The chapter describes the mining FDI ecosystem: key MNE players, recent trends and outlook and investment policy directions. It discusses the different types of impacts that mining FDI can have on host countries, with a particular view towards poor and vulnerable economies.

Asian economies are attempting to (re)balance their interests in fostering burgeoning outbound investment and attracting inbound investment, while preserving appropriate regulatory autonomy, while maintaining an attractive environment for foreign investors. To understand the issues and the likely future trajectory for international investment law in the region, this chapter first introduces Poulsen’s comprehensive recent study focusing on the experiences of developing countries world-wide, but including analyses of several Asian states (as outlined in Part 2 below). Despite marshalling powerful arguments and evidence for manifestations of ‘bounded rationality’ in BIT negotiations and drafting, some limits to his theory are suggested by a closer analysis of several countries in the region (Part 3). Given such historical experiences, it seems premature to abandon altogether the current treaty protection regime. Nonetheless, a combination of new approaches is worth considering under existing treaties, including more principled use of proportionality testing and deference to host state decision-making (Part 4.1). Greater care is also needed when assessing the net benefits from entering into new treaties, including the latest research into whether investor-state dispute settlement provisions lead to significantly greater cross-border investment (Part 4.2).