FDI my oh my

This blog is actually in response to a David Jonah post about Canada lagging behind its peers in economic growth. I have commented on this in the past. While the PM and his team continue to tell Canadians we are the best in the world for everything, we have steadily dropped on the Human Development Index, on the Broadband Penetration Index, on the GDP per capita measurement, etc. We are easily now 7th or 8th in the world for most global metrics (12th on the corruption index but that’s another matter). 8th is not bad in general but when you are dropping, that’s a concern.

Anyway, the primary purpose of this blog is to remind readers that FDI is way down in Canada – coincidentally about the time that Paul Martin came to power and cut the Team Canada investment missions – but I am loathe to draw any conclusion there.

But in fairness to the PM, he said last night in the debate that the reason why his company flies the Bermudan flag is that he wants Canadian companies to invest abroad.

He is getting his wish. $47 billion in investment outflow in 2004 and $6 billion inflow.

http://www.oecd.org/dataoecd/13/62/35032229.pdf