Infographic: Foreign investment flows into Latin America

Direct foreign investment to Latin America was up significantly last year, as this cool infographic from Americas Quarterly illustrates.

Source: Americas Quarterly

In South America, natural resources garnered the largest share of the incoming money. By contrast, manufacturing represented the biggest slice of the pie in Mexico, Central America and the Caribbean.

Here's more on foreign investment per country:

• Brazil: While Chinese investors spent the last decade buying up natural resources across Africa, this year they’ve begun an unprecedented shopping spree in Brazil. In less than 12 months, Chinese investment has jumped by orders of magnitude — from a registered $82 million in 2009 to more than $25 billion in planned projects reported so far this year.
• Caribbean: The Beijing government and private Chinese corporations are spending billions in the Caribbean, building major tourism projects, financing roads and ports and buying companies — all of which are helping open new markets for Chinese products. The onslaught has cash-strapped Caribbean governments simultaneously praising China as a welcome benefactor and questioning what the country wants in exchange.
• Colombia: There’s been a five-fold increase in direct foreign investment in Colombia over the past eight years. Billions more in short-term “portfolio” capital have flowed into the country. As a result, Colombia was recently included in a new economic grouping called CIVETS, an acronym for the so-called “Baby BRICs” that includes Indonesia, Vietnam, Egypt, Turkey and South Africa.
• Mexico: Amid the violence, a growing number of foreign companies are discovering that Mexico’s once-peaceful industrial heartland is still a desirable place to do business. The murder rate may have doubled in the past five years, but foreign direct investment is growing every year. Last year, multinationals invested almost $2 billion in Monterrey, considerably more than the $1.4 billion of foreign direct investment in 2008 before the 2009 global recession.

Follow Stephanie on Twitter: @stephaniegarlow

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