Countries Attracting the Most Foreign Direct Investment (2025)

The United States took in about $277 billion of foreign direct investment (FDI) in 2025, more than any other country, according to the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD). Singapore, Hong Kong, and China followed. FDI is money that a company in one country puts into a business in another and keeps there, so it works as a long-term vote on where firms expect rules, workers, and customers to hold up. The ranking is real, but reading it correctly takes some care, because several of the biggest numbers are accounting artifacts.

Educational only, not financial advice. Investing involves risk of loss; past performance does not guarantee future results. Consult a licensed financial advisor before making investment decisions.

Every figure below comes from UNCTAD's World Investment Reports (the 2025 edition covering 2024, and the 2026 edition covering 2025) unless another source is named. The 2026 report also revises earlier years, so a country's 2024 number in this article can differ from the one in last year's report. Where that matters, the text says so.

Key takeaways

• Global FDI inflows were about $1.624 trillion in 2025, up 6% from a revised $1.532 trillion in 2024. Excluding flows through major European financial centres, the rise was 4%, after two years of decline.
• The top 20 host economies took more than 80% of the world total, and developing economies made up half of that top 20.
• The United States ($277 billion), Singapore ($151 billion), Hong Kong ($116 billion), and China ($105 billion) together received about $649 billion, roughly 40% of the global total (calculated from UNCTAD's figures).
• China's inflows fell from $189.1 billion in 2022 to about $105 billion in 2025, a drop of roughly 44%, though UNCTAD describes the decline as slowing.
• Headline FDI is distorted by "conduit" flows. In 2024, Ireland (negative $38.9 billion) and Switzerland (negative $60.7 billion) reported net outflows on the inward-investment line, and Luxembourg reported $106.0 billion.

The 2025 ranking: top 20 host economies

UNCTAD's Figure I.4 in the 2026 report lists the 20 largest recipients of FDI inflows. The table below reproduces it, with the 2024 rank in parentheses. Values are in billions of US dollars, rounded as UNCTAD publishes them.

2025 rank	Economy (2024 rank)	2025 inflows	2024 inflows (revised)
1	United States (1)	$277 billion	$284 billion
2	Singapore (3)	$151 billion	$136 billion
3	Hong Kong, China (2)	$116 billion	$138 billion
4	China (4)	$105 billion	$116 billion
5	Brazil (6)	$77 billion	$63 billion
6	United Kingdom (21)	$75 billion	$16 billion
7	Germany (18)	$74 billion	$21 billion
8	Canada (5)	$67 billion	$67 billion
9	United Arab Emirates (9)	$48 billion	$46 billion
10	Mexico (11)	$41 billion	$38 billion
11	India (13)	$39 billion	$27 billion
12	Australia (7)	$35 billion	$51 billion
13	Saudi Arabia (17)	$33 billion	$21 billion
14	Sweden (16)	$30 billion	$22 billion
15	Israel (22)	$26 billion	$15 billion
16	Russian Federation (71)	$25 billion	$2 billion
17	France (10)	$22 billion	$42 billion
18	Indonesia (15)	$21 billion	$25 billion
19	Viet Nam (19)	$20 billion	$20 billion
20	Spain (12)	$20 billion	$34 billion

Source: UNCTAD, World Investment Report 2026, Figure I.4 (FDI/MNE database). The 2024 column is the revised figure shown in the 2026 report. Ranks 12 through 20 are ordered by the 2025 values shown in the chart.

Three things stand out. The order at the top is stable: the United States has led for years. The middle of the table is volatile, with the United Kingdom jumping from 21st to 6th and Germany from 18th to 7th in a single year. And developing economies hold half the places, according to UNCTAD, although the United Kingdom replaced Egypt this year, trimming the developing-economy count from 11 to 10.

How FDI gets measured, and why the totals mislead

FDI, in the statistical definition UNCTAD uses, means a lasting interest in a firm in another economy. The usual benchmark is an equity stake of 10% or more of voting power, which separates a strategic investor from someone simply buying shares. Central banks and statistical offices report the flows through the balance of payments (the national account of money moving in and out of a country), and UNCTAD collects and harmonizes them.

Here is the catch. The statistic counts money moving between related companies, not factories being built. A multinational can lend money from one subsidiary to another, move intellectual property between its units, or route a dividend through a holding company, and each of those registers as FDI. UNCTAD's own report notes that financial flows "can cause large swings in recorded FDI without reflecting genuine changes in productive economic activity."

Conduit economies and "phantom" FDI

Some economies are used as pass-through points. The International Monetary Fund researchers Jannick Damgaard, Thomas Elkjaer, and Niels Johannesen described this in 2019 as "phantom FDI": investment that passes through empty corporate shells (special purpose entities) that handle holding activities, intragroup lending, or intangible assets. They estimated that phantom investment had risen from roughly 30% to almost 40% of global FDI in less than a decade, and that Luxembourg and the Netherlands together hosted nearly half of it. Ten economies, including Hong Kong, Singapore, Ireland, Switzerland, and the British Virgin Islands, hosted more than 85%.

You can see the effect in UNCTAD's annex data. The table shows first-published 2024 inflows for the European hubs, alongside 2023.

Economy	2023 inflows	2024 inflows (WIR 2025)
Luxembourg	negative $9.3 billion	$106.0 billion
Netherlands	negative $184.4 billion	$9.3 billion
Ireland	negative $2.7 billion	negative $38.9 billion
Switzerland	negative $21.4 billion	negative $60.7 billion
Belgium	$27.9 billion	negative $26.7 billion
United Kingdom	$52.2 billion	negative $40.0 billion
Germany	$52.0 billion	$5.7 billion

Source: UNCTAD, World Investment Report 2025, Annex table 1.

A negative number does not mean investors fled in the ordinary sense. It means that, on net, foreign parents pulled money out of their local subsidiaries through repayments of intragroup loans, share buybacks, or reconfigurations, for example. Those moves can be driven by tax planning and corporate restructuring rather than by whether Ireland is an attractive place to run a factory. UNCTAD says that conduit flows through major hubs subtracted about $70 billion from the 2024 global total and about $40 billion from the 2025 total, and that Switzerland and Ireland, in that order, accounted for most of the 2025 swing.

Why numbers get revised

Preliminary FDI figures are estimates that statisticians later correct. The 2025 report put the United Kingdom's 2024 inflows at negative $40.0 billion and Germany's at $5.7 billion. The 2026 report shows $16 billion and $21 billion for the same year. Hong Kong moved from $126 billion to $138 billion, and Singapore from $143 billion to $136 billion. The practical lesson is to treat any single year's ranking as provisional, and to give less weight to year-to-year jumps in hub economies than to multi-year patterns in large countries.

Flows versus stocks: who holds the most foreign capital

A flow is the money arriving in a year. A stock is the cumulative value of foreign-owned assets at a point in time. Stock figures change slowly and say more about who has been a long-term destination.

Economy	Inward FDI stock, 2024
United States	$15.6 trillion
China	$3.7 trillion
United Kingdom	$3.3 trillion
Netherlands	$2.7 trillion
Hong Kong, China	$2.4 trillion
Singapore	$2.2 trillion
Canada	$1.8 trillion
Germany	$1.2 trillion
Ireland	$1.2 trillion
Luxembourg	$1.1 trillion
France	$1.0 trillion
Brazil	$0.9 trillion

Source: UNCTAD, World Investment Report 2025, Annex table 2. World total: $50.9 trillion. Financial centres such as the British Virgin Islands ($1.1 trillion) are excluded from this list.

The stock table tells a different story from the flow table. The United States holds roughly 31% of the world's inward stock (calculated from the same annex: 15.6 divided by 50.9). China sits second on the stock ranking even though its flows are shrinking, because it spent two decades accumulating foreign-owned factories. The Netherlands and Luxembourg hold trillions in stock despite small or negative flows, which again reflects their role as holding-company locations.

Rates of return give one more angle. UNCTAD estimates the global rate of return on inward FDI at 7.0% in 2025, down from 10.2% in 2024 and 10.8% in 2022. Weaker returns reduce the incentive to expand abroad, one reason UNCTAD describes the investment recovery as fragile.

The United States: still the biggest, with a technology tilt

UNCTAD records US inflows of $277 billion in 2025, broadly stable against 2024 and the largest in the world. The value of announced greenfield projects (new facilities, as opposed to takeovers) rose 30%, while the number of projects fell by more than 10%. In plain terms, fewer but much larger deals.

The single largest announced project in the developed world in 2025 was Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company's planned US semiconductor investment, listed by UNCTAD at an estimated $100 billion in capital expenditure. Spain's Iberdrola ($20 billion, renewable energy) and Australia's Woodside ($17.5 billion, oil and gas) are also on the 2025 list of ten biggest. UNCTAD links the pattern to public incentives for chip production in the United States and Europe, and to heavy demand for data centers. For how those chips are made, see How Semiconductor Fabs Work.

An announced project is not a completed one. Greenfield numbers are intentions with a projected price tag, and UNCTAD stresses that they are statistically separate from the balance-of-payments flows. A fab announced in 2025 may be paid for over a decade.

Cross-border mergers and acquisitions (M&A) in the United States stayed the highest in the world, although values declined from 2024. For context on the size of the host economy, see Largest Economies in the World by GDP.

Singapore and Hong Kong: the two hubs that rank in the top three

Singapore ($151 billion) and Hong Kong ($116 billion) rank second and third in 2025, a remarkable result for two city-sized economies. Their figures are high largely because they are regional headquarters locations and financial hubs, where multinationals park holding companies and route investment into the rest of Asia. UNCTAD notes that Hong Kong, Singapore, and the United Arab Emirates together account for more than one third of inflows to developing economies.

That does not make their FDI fake. Singapore also attracted large real projects, including a $7 billion Micron Technology semiconductor project that appears among the ten largest announced greenfield investments in developing Asia in 2025. But comparing Singapore's inflow with Brazil's, for instance, mixes two different things: one is a financial gateway, the other a large domestic market.

Hong Kong received about 18% of East Asia's FDI inflows in 2025, according to UNCTAD, "reflecting its role as a headquarters location and financial hub."

China: from $189 billion to about $105 billion

China's FDI inflows peaked recently. UNCTAD's annex gives the sequence:

Year	China FDI inflows
2019	$141.2 billion
2020	$149.3 billion
2021	$181.0 billion
2022	$189.1 billion
2023	$163.3 billion
2024	$116.2 billion
2025	about $105 billion

Source: UNCTAD, World Investment Report 2025 Annex table 1 (2019 to 2024) and World Investment Report 2026 (2025 figure, shown as about $105 billion).

The 2024 drop was 29%. China ranked fourth among host economies in both 2024 and 2025. UNCTAD's explanation in the 2026 report combines several forces: higher interest rates and more profit repatriation, which reduce measured net flows; rising labor costs; and multinationals shifting labor-intensive, export-oriented manufacturing toward South-East Asia, a trend UNCTAD says "China+1" strategies, geopolitical considerations, tariff uncertainty, and technology-related restrictions reinforced.

The pace of decline has slowed, from more than $160 billion in 2023 to about $105 billion in 2025, and the mix is changing. UNCTAD, citing China's Ministry of Commerce, says foreign investment in scientific research and technical services made up nearly one fifth of China's FDI inflows in 2025, with 14,000 new foreign-invested enterprises established in that sector, up 27%. AstraZeneca's roughly $3 billion investment in research and pharmaceutical manufacturing is one example. A reasonable reading is that China is losing some labor-intensive investment while continuing to draw capital into higher-value activities.

Other tallies of China's FDI can differ from UNCTAD's because agencies use different definitions, for example whether money leaving the country is netted out. UNCTAD's inflow series, used throughout this article, puts 2024 at $116.2 billion. On the UNCTAD series, the direction since 2022 is clearly downward.

Brazil, Canada, and Mexico: the Americas beyond the United States

Latin America and the Caribbean, excluding offshore financial centers, took in about $188 billion in 2025, up 14% from $165 billion. Brazil and Mexico together accounted for roughly two thirds of the region's inflows, and the top 10 recipients for 95%.

Brazil is the region's largest destination. Its inflows rose 23%, from $63 billion to $77 billion in 2025, supported by renewable energy, natural resources, and technology. UNCTAD points to a data center investment of more than $40 billion announced by China's ByteDance. Mexico's inflows rose 8%, from about $38 billion to $41 billion, supported by its role in regional production networks and by investment in services and manufacturing. Peru's inflows doubled to $11.8 billion, and Argentina's fell 56% to about $4 billion.

Canada's inflows were unchanged at $67 billion in 2025. UNCTAD notes that uncertainty around the forthcoming review of the United States-Mexico-Canada Agreement, which underpins North American supply chains, weighed on investment decisions, and that announced greenfield value in Canada's supply-chain-intensive industries more than halved, driven mainly by the automotive sector. For a view of how currency moves affect these flows, see Why Currency Exchange Rates Change.

The United Kingdom and Germany: why two rich economies jumped

The United Kingdom rose from $16 billion to $75 billion and Germany from $21 billion to $74 billion, according to the 2026 report. UNCTAD attributes Europe's overall 39% increase, from $204 billion to $285 billion, to large movements through financial centers and investment hubs, plus stronger investment in several large host economies.

For Germany, the report highlights large M&A transactions such as DSV (Denmark) acquiring Schenker and ADNOC (United Arab Emirates) acquiring Covestro. For the United Kingdom, it describes strong M&A and greenfield investment alongside pronounced financial-centre effects, reflecting its dual role as a large market and an investment hub. In France, inflows halved to $22 billion, yet France became the second-largest destination for announced greenfield projects in Europe by value, with more than $90 billion announced, driven by two artificial-intelligence campuses: a $43 billion project by the United Arab Emirates' MGX and a $16 billion project by Canada's Brookfield. Announcements and booked inflows follow different clocks.

The Gulf: investors and destinations at once

The United Arab Emirates received $48 billion and Saudi Arabia $33 billion in 2025. Both economies are also large outward investors: UNCTAD ranks the UAE ninth among home economies (63 billion dollars of outflows in 2025), and Kuwait entered the top 20 for outflows. West Asia's overall inflows rose from $92 billion to almost $111 billion, powered by energy, infrastructure, and diversification strategies.

UNCTAD also flags a risk. The escalation of conflict in the Middle East in 2026 is described as a major adverse shock to the global investment environment, raising costs, insurance, and uncertainty, and possibly causing Gulf investors to turn inward. The report notes delayed or canceled M&A deals as an early sign. For related reading on state-owned investors, see Countries With the Largest Sovereign Wealth Funds.

India and South-East Asia: who is gaining from supply-chain shifts

South Asia's FDI inflows rose from $34 billion to $46 billion in 2025, with India's up 44% to $39 billion (revised 2024 base: $27 billion). Google's cumulative $14.5 billion investment in information and communications technology and internet infrastructure, and a $4 billion investment by Poland's Hynfra, are among the large projects UNCTAD cites.

The picture for manufacturing is more cautious. India's announced greenfield investment fell from more than $111 billion in 2024 to about $74 billion in 2025, and in manufacturing alone from about $65 billion to $27 billion. UNCTAD links the slowdown to tariff uncertainty, supply-chain realignment, and weaker global investment sentiment. Services held up, with information and communications technology the largest sector in 2025.

South-East Asia took in $244 billion in 2025, up 10%, with eight of 11 countries recording growth. Malaysia's inflows grew 51%, Thailand's 30%, and Viet Nam's 1%. Indonesia ($21 billion) and Viet Nam ($20 billion) both sit in the top 20.

These numbers fit the "China plus one" pattern, but they do not show a clean one-for-one transfer. East Asia's inflows fell $32 billion between 2024 and 2025, from $270 billion to $238 billion, while South-East Asia and South Asia together rose by $34 billion. Some of the money is moving to neighbors, and some has simply paused. For a broader look at why trade ties are loosening, see Why the World Is Deglobalising and What It Means for Everyone.

Africa: a record year, then a hangover

In 2024 FDI to Africa reached a record, $97 billion in the 2025 report ($94 billion on the later revised basis), lifted by a single sovereign-wealth-fund-backed real estate megaproject at Ras El-Hekma in Egypt. In 2025 inflows fell 26% to $70 billion. UNCTAD notes that even so, 2025 was Africa's third-highest year since 1990, and that excluding the exceptional peaks (the Egypt deal in 2024 and a corporate reconfiguration in South Africa in 2021), 2025 was the strongest performance in recent decades.

The detail varies by country. Egypt remained the largest African recipient at about $15 billion. Mozambique took in about $6 billion, mostly for natural gas, and Guinea's inflows more than quintupled to about $8 billion because of mining. South Africa recorded negative inflows of about $2.3 billion, mainly from intracompany financial flows.

Developing economies as a group received $901 billion in 2025, and UNCTAD reports FDI was about 50% of their total external financing, ahead of remittances (32%), portfolio investment (10%), and official development assistance (8%). In the least developed countries, FDI was 24% and aid 39%. For the remittance side, see Countries That Send the Most Remittances.

Where the money goes: greenfield, mergers, and project finance

UNCTAD tracks three kinds of cross-border deals alongside the balance-of-payments flows, and the three moved differently in 2025:

Type of deal	2024	2025	Change
Greenfield project announcements (value)	$1,379 billion	$1,393 billion	+1% (number of projects: -10%)
Cross-border M&A (value)	$454 billion	$421 billion	-7%
International project finance (value)	$1,153 billion	$1,182 billion	+3% (number of deals: -11%)

Source: UNCTAD, World Investment Report 2026, key findings figure. Project data are announcements, not completed spending.

The growth in project value was concentrated in digital infrastructure. UNCTAD says the gain came mainly from data centers, followed by oil and gas and semiconductors, while renewable energy, general infrastructure, and manufacturing registered significant declines. That narrowness is why UNCTAD calls the recovery fragile. A handful of artificial intelligence campuses can lift the aggregate while most sectors stagnate. For the demand side of that story, see Countries With the Most Data Centers.

The investors are diversifying too. UNCTAD notes that more than a quarter of the companies in its 2026 list of the top 100 multinationals are state-owned, and that private equity firms account for about 20% of global M&A.

What the long-run trend shows

Zooming out, FDI has not kept pace with the rest of the global economy. UNCTAD's Figure I.1 indexes FDI, trade, and GDP to 100 in 2010. By 2025, trade and GDP were well above 150, while FDI sat at roughly 115 (read from the chart). Excluding conduit flows, 2025 inflows were about 10% above the 2010 to 2024 average.

Developed economies' inflows remained 13% below their 15-year average in 2025, while those to developing economies were 23% above theirs. That reversal explains much of the rise of Asian, Latin American, and Gulf hubs in the rankings, and why rich-country policymakers pay such close attention to FDI incentives.

What attracts FDI, and what the data can and cannot show

Standard economic reasoning points to a handful of factors: the size of the domestic market, access to skilled workers, infrastructure, legal protection for investors, and tax treatment. Resource-rich economies draw investment tied to minerals and energy, and a country with a large market such as Brazil can attract investment even with imperfect conditions.

The ranking cannot directly show causality, however. A few reasons are built into the data:

• Hub effects. Hong Kong, Singapore, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands attract capital because of their legal and tax structures, not because of local demand.
• Lumpy deals. One large takeover can swing a mid-sized economy's rank by double digits, as Germany and the United Kingdom showed.
• Announcement lag. Greenfield values show intentions. Some announcements are never completed or are spread over many years.
• Size effects. A raw dollar ranking favors large economies. A country such as the United Arab Emirates can matter a great deal to its own economy at $48 billion, while the same figure is small for the United States.

For comparison across countries of different sizes, researchers normally scale FDI by GDP or by capital formation. For a reference on national income, see What Is GDP and Why It Matters.

Frequently Asked Questions

Q: What is the difference between FDI and portfolio investment? A: FDI means a lasting interest in a business, normally an equity stake of 10% or more of voting power, or building new facilities. Portfolio investment means buying stocks or bonds without a controlling stake, and it can usually be sold quickly. FDI tends to be stickier, which is why governments value it, though conduit flows blur the picture.

Q: Which country attracts the most foreign direct investment? A: The United States, with about $277 billion in 2025 according to UNCTAD. Singapore ($151 billion), Hong Kong ($116 billion), and China ($105 billion) followed. The US has held first place for years and also has by far the largest inward stock, at $15.6 trillion in 2024.

Q: Why do Ireland, Luxembourg, and the Netherlands have such strange FDI numbers? A: Multinationals route holding companies, intragroup loans, and intellectual property through them, often for tax reasons. UNCTAD's 2024 data show Ireland at negative $38.9 billion and Luxembourg at $106.0 billion, while 2023 showed the Netherlands at negative $184.4 billion. These swings reflect financial restructuring, not factory building.

Q: Why has China's FDI fallen so much? A: UNCTAD's figures show a fall from $189.1 billion in 2022 to about $105 billion in 2025. The agency cites higher interest rates, more profit repatriation, rising labor costs, supply-chain shifts toward South-East Asia, geopolitical considerations, tariff uncertainty, and technology restrictions. It says the decline is slowing and the mix is shifting toward research and technical services.

Q: What is greenfield investment, and how does it differ from M&A? A: Greenfield investment means building a new facility, such as a factory or data center. M&A means buying an existing company. Both count toward FDI, but greenfield adds new capacity while M&A changes ownership. UNCTAD tracks announced greenfield values separately, which were $1,393 billion in 2025, against $421 billion for cross-border M&A.

Q: Does a higher FDI ranking mean a country is a better place to invest? A: Not necessarily. Rankings by raw dollars favor large economies and financial hubs, and preliminary figures are revised, sometimes substantially. Analysts typically look at multi-year trends, FDI relative to GDP, and greenfield data before drawing conclusions, and none of this is advice about any particular investment.

Q: Is FDI recovering? A: Partly. UNCTAD reports a 6% rise in 2025 to $1.6 trillion, or 4% excluding conduit flows, after two years of decline. It calls the recovery fragile and narrow because it was concentrated in data centers, oil and gas, and semiconductors, and it flags significant downside risks for 2026 from trade policy uncertainty, geopolitical tensions, and conflicts.

The takeaway

The FDI league table is less a scoreboard of who is "winning" than a map of where large companies are placing long-term bets, with several layers of accounting noise on top. The stable facts are that the United States leads by a wide margin, that China's inflows have fallen by close to half since 2022, and that Asian and Gulf hubs and a few large emerging economies take a large share of the rest. The unstable facts are the rank of any hub economy in any single year, and the dollar value of announced mega-projects. Reading the rankings well means asking, for each large number, whether it describes new capacity or a company moving money between its own subsidiaries.

Sources

• UNCTAD. World Investment Report 2026, Chapter I: International investment trends. Data for 2025, including the top 20 host economies (Figure I.4), regional trends, and project data.
• UNCTAD. World Investment Report 2025, Overview. Global and regional FDI figures for 2024.
• UNCTAD. World Investment Report 2025, Annex tables. Country-level FDI inflows (2019 to 2024) and inward stocks (2000, 2010, 2023, 2024).
• Damgaard J, Elkjaer T, Johannesen N. The Rise of Phantom Investments. IMF Finance & Development, September 2019.

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