World Association of Investment Promotion Agencies (WAIPA) and the United Nations Economic and Social Commission for the Asia and Pacific (UNESCAP) jointly organized an Investment Conference on the 21st and 22nd of February in Bangkok, Thailand.
The Conference was organized as a platform of dialogue and knowledge-sharing for the relevant stakeholders of the investment realm based in the region of Asia and the Pacific. The underlying objective in engaging these actors to participate and share their experiential knowledge was to prepare the roadmap for further advancement of FDI flows in the given region.
The keynote addresses for the event were given by Kaveh Zahedi, Deputy Executive Secretary, United Nations ESCAP; Deepak Bagla, President, WAIPA & CEO Invest India; Ismail Ersahin, Executive Director, WAIPA and Narit Therdsteerasukdi, Secretary-General, Board of Investment Thailand.
The Conference consisted of a series of panels on critical contemporary themes such as digital FDI, climate change and sustainability, and effective investment strategies on the first day. Stakeholder partnership and collaboration between the private and public sectors via the investment promotion agencies (IPAs) were identified as major action points for the various themes under discussion.
The panel discussions were followed by a couple of capacity-building workshops on the second day. These workshops were aimed at training the participating IPA representatives in being proactive while undertaking their usual business operations and secondly, to make their existing policies in sync with the evolving space of Digital FDI.
