Director-General of the Arab Investment & Export Credit Guarantee Corporation (Dhaman), Abdullah Ahmad Al-Sabeeh said the corporation does not rule out a positive performance of foreign direct investments in Arab countries during 2021 following an unexpected rise by 2.5 percent during 2020.
Dhaman has urged Arab countries to step up efforts to attract more foreign direct investments.
Amid fierce competition between countries regionally and internationally, the call has been made to draw more investors, mainly multinational companies.
Dhaman said this could be achieved through continuous efforts to improve the investment climate.
In an editorial, “Mixed Expectations of Foreign Investment in the Region”, Al-Sabeeh added that the database of the FDI Markets shows a fall in the number of foreign projects in the region by 6.9 percent to 285 projects in the first half of 2021, in addition to a drop in the capital investment by 16.8 percent to $12.4 billion compared with the same period of 2020.
He said: “The peculiarity of the Arab situation, the expected extraordinary activity of several countries in the field of enterprise attraction and foreign direct investment, and the epidemic, political and economic developments in the region would determine how the year 2021 exactly looks like.”
Internationally, he cited reports of a limited recovery of FDI influx worldwide by 10-15 percent during this year, following the negative impacts of the coronavirus pandemic on the size of inflows during 2020.
They are also predicted to keep rebounding during 2022 to reach up to $1.5 trillion.
Al-Sabeeh stressed that Dhaman would step up efforts to offer insurance packages covering various political and commercial risks that foreign investors may face in the region and to raise awareness of the developments of the investment climate and requirements for improvement in cooperation with member states.
Dhaman is a multilateral credit and political risk insurance provider. Established in Kuwait in 1974, it comprises all Arab countries and four joint Arab financial institutions.
