São Paulo – The Public Authority for Investment Promotion and Export Development of Oman was among the organisations winning the investment promotion award granted on Monday (29) by the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (Unctad), a United Nations (UN) organisation headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland.
The award, according to an Unctad press release, is granted to national investment promotion agencies that were successful in the attraction of quality projects, having facilitated the access of their countries to global productive chains and benefitting from these chains.
The Unctad objective is to promote successful initiatives in attraction of foreign direct investment (FDI) turned to exports.
“The investment decisions of transnational corporations (TNCs) are today increasingly linked to international trade patterns and the growth of global value chains (GVCs), which now contribute to 80 per cent of global trade,” says the Unctad’s press statement. “Such investment can help countries to broaden their participation in GVCs and to capture higher-value activities and upgrade their exports,” it adds.
Apart from the agency from Oman, also awarded were the Jamaica Promotions Corporation, the Investment and Development Agency of Latvia. According to the Unctad, these three organisations managed to attract foreign direct investment “in a highly competitive environment and against the background of a global fall in FDI last year”.
“Jamaica, Latvia and Oman secured export-oriented FDI projects in a variety of sectors in manufacturing and services thanks to their innovative TNC targeting and the efficient use of public–private partnerships involving local centres of talent and local suppliers,” pointed out the UN agency.
One of the multinational companies that operate in Oman is Brazilian mining company Vale, which has an iron ore pelleting mill in the Gulf country and a maritime terminal, whose objective is to supply markets in the Middle East and Asia.
The award has been granted since 2002. Also participating in the most recent dispute were the investment promotion agencies of the Dominican Republic, Mauritius, Mexico, Nicaragua, South Africa and Andalusia, in Spain.
*Translated by Mark Ament
