Distinguished delegates, distinguished experts,
Ladies and gentlemen, dear colleagues
Welcome to the 12th session of this multi-year expert meeting on investment, innovation and entrepreneurship.
At its core, investment is a bet on the future. Every factory, every grid, every port, every clinic begins as someone’s decision to put capital to work. Today, that decision is becoming harder to take – and its consequences are felt unevenly across the world.
Before yielding the floor, I want to make two points: first, on the forces reshaping global investment; second, on what this meeting can do to help our member states navigate them.
I start with the forces.
Global investment is dealing with unprecedented volatility and geopolitical shocks. As a result, FDI flows have swung – falling 11% in 2024, rising 5% last year – and are very hard to predict for this year. But some structural dynamics are clearer to see.
One is that investment is concentrating. In sectors: AI, clean energy, semiconductors, critical minerals. And in countries: 75% of FDI going to the global South now flows to just 10 economies. Most developing countries, and almost every LDC, watch progress pass them by.
The geography of investment is also changing. Trade tensions, industrial policy and geopolitical alignment are redrawing where firms locate production. For countries well connected to regional networks, this opens new possibilities. For those on the margins, it raises the prospect of being left further behind.
None of this is abstract. For many developing countries, FDI is not one more channel of finance; it’s the main one. It brings jobs, technology, integration in global value chains. When it slows, or concentrates, or reroutes, the cost is felt at home: in the plant that does not open, in the supplier that never connects, in the job that never materializes.
Not everything points in the same direction. Sustainable finance reached $8.2 trillion in 2024, growing 17% in a year. South-South investment is rising. Developing countries are advancing reforms. These are bright spots. But the broader trend is clear: investment is becoming more selective, more political, and more unequal.
This brings me to my second point – what this meeting can do.
The questions before you are precisely the questions our member states are asking. How can developing countries compete in strategic sectors with limited fiscal space? How can they manage security concerns without closing the door to investment? How can capital tied to artificial intelligence reach the economies that need it most? And how can the international community keep this system from fragmenting further?
Your agenda – from strategic sector prioritization and industrial policy design, to regional integration and the implications of artificial intelligence for global FDI – speaks to all of them.
This meeting is also the right place to remember what investment is ultimately for. The title of this gathering carries three words – investment, innovation, entrepreneurship – and it is the relationship among them that builds productive capacity.
A foreign investor that arrives in a country without local suppliers, local talent and local entrepreneurs to build with does not stay for long. Strengthening domestic ecosystems – through MSME finance, through skills, through investment facilitation – is what turns inbound capital into lasting development. UN Trade and Development (UNCTAD) will keep doing its part: our Investment Policy Framework, our Empretec entrepreneurship programme, our investment facilitation work, and the World Investment Forum that will gather in Doha this October, are all instruments at the service of our member states.
The Geneva Consensus, agreed at UNCTAD16 just months ago, reaffirms our shared commitment to an open, inclusive and development-oriented investment environment. This meeting can give that commitment substance – by turning these questions into concrete, realistic policy options that member states can take home and use.
Excellencies, distinguished experts,
UNCTAD will continue to provide the data, the analysis and the practical support that makes this dialogue useful. I wish you two very productive days.
I thank you.