Foreign direct investment (FDI) that fosters green growth and development while preserving natural assets will make a key contribution to efforts to curb climate change and achieve the SDGs. In the run-up to COP26, the OECD’s Iris Mantovani explores the contribution of FDI to lowering carbon emissions and advancing green growth.
The current crisis is stretching developing countries’ financing capacities to their limits. Already suffering from rising debt levels and the risk of debt distress, and insufficient domestic and external financing resources, developing countries are now struggling to mitigate the interrelated health, humanitarian and economic effects of the pandemic.
The Covid-19 pandemic has caused a global humanitarian, social and economic crisis. Poverty will rise for the first time since 1998, with hundreds of millions of jobs lost and livelihoods affected. Many of the jobs affected by the pandemic depend on investments and operations of multinational enterprises (MNEs) and their buyers and suppliers in global value chains. But foreign direct investment (FDI) is estimated to fall by at least 30% in 2020 – meaning that fewer jobs than expected have been and will be created.
On the level 