Authors
Mirela Rusu
Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Romania
e-mail address mirelanicoli@yahoo.com
ORCID: 0009-0002-9388-7044
- Volume 7 Issue (1) 2023
27-38
Attracting foreign direct investment to the Western Balkans has been in the last decades a major challenge for administrations and political parties ruling the respective countries. However, the perception that their legal system is slow, pressured by political influence and political frictions, that the government policies are unreliable, corrupted and affected by direct interference (immixtion directe) of the national political systems and their policies, have prevented foreign investors to invest massively in SEE.
Against this background, the findings of the article show that factors related to good governance such as the rule of law, including judicial efficiency, freedom from corruption, political environment and stability, efficiency in the public administration, environmental politics, risk and crisis management may be more relevant to attracting Foreign Direct Investment in the post war period than factors related to the economic potential or the capital and labor of the market, or other controversial elements such as taxation, wage variation, exchange rates, growth or trade balance.
However, in periods troubled by secessionist movements and tendencies, the process initiated by the UK government to withdrawn from the EU – the Brexit process, could send a negative signal to the states where economic and political nationalism is an important factor in the rhetoric of the political class.
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