Was Egypt really the world’s fifth-largest recipient of FDI in 7M2016?
Were we really the world’s fifth-largest recipient of FDI in 7M2016? We took note last week of a Financial Times data point suggesting we indeed were, with inflows of USD 20.7 bn. Reader Alex W. wrote in the next day, questioning the math, noting (among other things) that “If you look at the most recent CBE data, total FDI inflows were about USD 9.5 bn for the period from July 2015-March 2016, including USD 3.5 bn for the January-March 2016 period.” The nice people at fDi Markets, the FT company that compiles the stats, had this to say: “Thank you for your query regarding the greenfield investment figures from our database fDi Markets. There are discrepancies with government statistics due to the differing ways of calculating FDI. Our figures include announced as well as launched projects, and the full projected investment amount is included in the year of announcement; this is a key reason why our figures are higher in some years than the government figures.”