The chart above shows the foreign direct investment (FDI) in dollars for each EU state in 2012. Three states accounted for half of the foreign inflows in the EU: Luxembourg, the United Kingdom, and Ireland.
Findings
- The difference between the state with the most FDI, Luxembourg, and the state with the least, Italy, is $79,552,000,000.
- Luxembourg has 856.40 times the FDI that Italy does.
- The median FDI in the 28 EU states is $5,639,000,000 and the mean $13,027,000,000.
- Eight states accounted for three-quarters of all FDI in the EU in 2012: Luxembourg, the United Kingdom, Ireland, Spain, Germany, the Netherlands, France, and Sweden.
Caveats
- All figures are rounded to the nearest whole.
- Note that FDI fluctuates wildly from year to year and that the numbers shown in the table only represent FDI for 2012. For instance, the trailing state, Italy received $34 billion just the year prior which would have ranked it just under Ireland in this table, and the leading state, Luxembourg received just under $10 billion which would have ranked it just above Belgium in this table, so this table only represents one year and should not be taken to infer typical FDI inflows to any state on any other given year.
Details
Western EU states did pretty well for themselves in 2012 and the Western EU as a region accounted for well over half of the FDI into the EU that year.
The bottom twenty states combined received less than one-quarter of the FDI into the EU in 2012.
Sources
United Nations Conference on Trade and Development. 2015. "World Investment Report." Accessed September 16, 2018. http://unctad.org/en/PublicationsLibrary/wir2015_en.pdf.