MIGA Announces Launch of Serbian-Language Investment Promotion Website

MIGA Announces Launch of Serbian-Language Investment Promotion Website

WASHINGTON, DC, June 3, 2005—The Multilateral Investment Guarantee Agency (MIGA), a member of the World Bank Group, announced today the launch of the Serbian-language version of its FDI Promotion Center, an online knowledge-sharing and learning portal for investment promotion professionals in developing countries.

The FDI Promotion Center​ provides resources to help countries improve their ability to secure foreign investment. The centerpiece is a toolkit that focuses on nine key aspects of investment promotion, including, for example, understanding FDI, creating a promotional strategy, and strengthening a location’s image.

The FDI Promotion Center also includes a wide-ranging collection of promotional tools, including case studies, sample presentations and advertising materials, guidelines and checklists, sample terms of reference, and sector and country-specific analyses to aid investment promotion practitioners in their daily work of attracting and retaining foreign investors.

“ Serbia is the first in a number of language-specific websites we’ll be launching in response to the growing demand for capacity-building assistance by investment promotion intermediaries around the world,” says John Wille, head of MIGA’s online investment information services. “We’re also seeing an increasing tendency for larger countries to devolve responsibility for in-vestment promotion activities to the provincial and municipal levels, hence the need for more region-specific content in local languages.” Forthcoming are regional websites in Russian and Arabic.

MIGA created the Serbian-language website, which will incorporate local case studies and best practices in cooperation with the Vojvodina Investment Promotion Fund (VIP). VIP, which helped pioneer this multilingual initiative, is aiming to use the Serbian version of the MIGA Toolkit to train in-vestment professionals and officials from local municipalities and raise awareness of the benefits of FDI for the region.

The Serbian-language FDI Promotion Center will augment the reach of the MIGA-administered European Investor Outreach Program for the Western Balkans (EIOP), which aims to increase investors’ awareness of the region’s investment potential, encourage investors to undertake site visits to explore possible investments, and ultimately to support investments in the region.

The FDI Promotion Center is part of a suite of online information services for prospective foreign investors, including FDI Xchange, an email alert service, IPAnet, an FDI portal for corporate investors, and PrivatizationLink, a specialized service delivering details on state-owned enterprises being divested in emerging economies worldwide.

 For information

Angela Gentile, agentile@worldbank.org,
t. 202.473.3509