Foreign entrepreneurs' assessment of Latvian investment environment has slightly improved

  • 2021-01-31
  • LETA/TBT Staff

RIGA - Foreign entrepreneurs' assessment of Latvia's investment environment slightly improved last year, the Foreign Investors' Council in Latvia (FICIL) concludes in its FICIL Sentiment Index 2020.

In the FICIL survey, the attractiveness of Latvia's investment environment has been evaluated with 2.7 points, which is a slight improvement in comparison with the 2.6 points in 2019 and 2.5 points in 2018. 

Investors were asked to evaluate the attractiveness of Latvia's investment environment on a five-point scale, where '1' means no improvement to investment attractiveness at all, '2' means slight improvement, '3' means some positive improvement, '4' means real improvement and '5' means that investment attractiveness has substantially improved.

Commenting on the issues of Latvia's investment environment, a representative of an IT company told authors of the survey that foreign investors in Latvia sometimes have difficulties opening bank accounts and that there are also problems with availability of labor force. An investor from the real estate sector, meanwhile, noted Latvia's achievements in dealing with money-laundering issues and praised Latvia's successful response to the Covid-19 crisis. 

From September to early November 2020, 44 senior executives representing companies that are key investors in Latvia were interviewed for the study. Altogether, these companies (including their subsidiaries) contribute to 16 percent of Latvia's total tax revenue, 13 percent of the total profit and employ 10 percent of the total workforce of companies with a turnover above EUR 145,000 and 50 percent foreign capital.