Towards a Balanced Investment Screening Framework

Towards a Balanced Investment Screening Framework is a book that seeks to gain a better understanding of the legal design of the investment screening framework in the European Union (EU) and its Member States. It determines what such mechanisms can or cannot accomplish, and in turn, what they should be able to accomplish to reconcile their objective: a balanced legal framework that reconciles the need to address security concerns with the need for an investment climate open for cross-border business.

What’s in this book:

This book approaches foreign investment control from national, European and international legal perspectives, and combines these analyses to identify and respond to key issues. This study covers:

• an analysis of the context and rationale of investment screening mechanisms, the content and functioning of these mechanisms, as well as the applicable legal limitations;
• a means to improve positive investment screening rules through a comparative evaluation between the investment screening laws of Germany, France, the Netherlands, Belgium, and the United States; and
  the fundamental issues with the legal order underpinning the investment screening framework, both internal (competence allocation in the EU) and external (international law).
• Ultimately, this book highlights priorities that national and European law- and policymakers should consider in order to act as a reliable and principled partner, albeit not a naïve one.

This thesis attempts to answer how the design of an investment screening mechanism can best incorporate these interests, and whether tradeoffs must be made. The goal of this thesis is to examine how the framework can be improved in both the short and long term, and to identify the key issues that must be resolved to achieve a balanced and reliable framework.