Shanghai has leapfrogged Singapore to become the most attractive financial centre for foreign direct investment (FDI), the former improving and the latter reducing the capital expenditure they received between October 2017 and September 2018 compared with a year earlier.
Shanghai’s total of $1.27bn has been earmarked for the opening of new offices or branches and is creating 1462 jobs, according to estimates by greenfield investment monitor fDi Intelligence. This gives it a ratio of nearly one job per $1m invested.
Others in the list displayed higher such ratios. Financial services FDI into Dublin and Beijing, for example, resulted in nearly three-and-a-half and nearly two jobs per $1m of investment, respectively.
Overall, the top 10 financial hubs by inward FDI attracted larger capital investment and created more jobs than they did in the previous period.
The same is true for the outward FDI lists. London leads the most recent table with an estimated $2.42bn and 7449 new jobs. It is followed by New York and Paris. The French hub has moved up from sixth to third place and its companies’ cumulative expansion projects abroad have resulted in the highest ratio of job creation over investment, at 4.72, in the outward ranking.
The most widely represented region across both inward and outward tables and across time periods is Asia. European centres are the second most numerous group.
