Investment protections will be crucial for ensuring full regional economic integration and will protect the competitiveness of U.S. industry. Foreign direct investment is crucial to the continued economic growth and stability in the Americas.
Foreign investment provides enormous benefits to host countries.
It serves as an engine of economic growth, which is the key to raising living, health, safety and environmental standards. Simply put, this means that in 1998, one out of every six dollars spent on gross fixed capital formation in Latin America and the Caribbean came from a foreign investor. Legal security, in form of strong international investment protections, is necessary to ensure continued economic integration and growth. Investors will not undertake large scale foreign investments if they do not have the confidence that host governments will be held accountable to a set of binding international protections. Conversely, host governments will not be able to attract the foreign investments that are necessary to their economic growth without ensuring investors that their investments are secure and protected from arbitrary measures imposed by local governments.