Where have all the foreigners gone?
Inward investment is dwindling painfully in Scotland, Wales and northern England
IN RECENT years, Britain has done well at attracting foreign investment. Last year Invest.UK, the government's inward investment agency, recorded 869 incoming projects expected to create 71,000 jobs. But now the flow of investment seems to be drying up.
In Scotland, Wales and the north of England, foreign direct investment (FDI) has replaced jobs lost in declining industries such as coal-mining and ship-building. In Scotland, 140,000 people, about 6% of the workforce, are employed by foreign-owned firms. While some of these jobs have come about through mergers and acquisitions of Scottish firms, most have been created by new investment.
This article appeared in the Britain section of the print edition under the headline "Where have all the foreigners gone?"
From the October 13th 2001 edition
Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents
Explore the editionMore from Britain
Why Britain’s membership of the ECHR has become a political issue
And why leaving would be a mistake
The ECtHR’s Swiss climate ruling: overreach or appropriate?
A ruling on behalf of pensioners does not mean the court has gone rogue
Why are so many bodies in Britain found in a decomposed state?
To understand Britons’ social isolation, consider their corpses