Companies from OECD- and emerging countries – do they want to invest in Trump’s U.S.?
April 14, 2025
President Trump’s trade war has certainly caused a lot of concern in most countries in the world, to a high extent in the U.S. as well. As I have tried to explain in my previous two blogs on this issue, many emerging markets are about to be hit dramatically by Trump’s economic world war (https://blogg.lnu.se/china-research/?p=3650¸ https://blogg.lnu.se/china-research/?p=3642). In this respect, one specific question still seems to be analytically neglected – which foreign companies actually want to invest in the U.S. in the foreseeable future.
Uncertainty vs large market
One can read and hear frequently these days that the ongoing trade war has been causing a lot of uncertainty about the future American behavior – or rather the future behavior of President Trump. And as we know from corporate practitioners and academics, uncertainty means a major stumbling block for investors (see for the latter group, for example, Bloom et al https://bfi.uchicago.edu/wp-content/uploads/2022/11/BFI_WP_2022-149.pdf). This leads us to the crucial question of this blog: How will foreign investors behave in the U.S.?
Looking more carefully at all the negative policy and institutional conditions created by President Trump, uncertainty exists at every corner and end. But at the same time President Trump wants foreign companies to move production to the U.S. Aren’t these two developments contradictory?
Looking somewhat more profoundly into ongoing institutional conditions, things are indeed on a deteriorating trend. Examples are
¤ President Trump’s unpredictable and changing psychological attitudes and decisions (which could be described as an institutional weakness);
¤ the determination of President Trump and his administration to appoint their supporters for important jobs (even in jurisdiction);
¤ the ongoing cuts of federal money to the research of famous American universities, meaning that many American academic researchers would like to leave the country; by the way, why are (most) Swedish academic institutions reacting so reluctantly on this new opportunity to attract disappointed American researchers;
¤ the recently started American “movement” to make conditions more complicated for incoming foreign visitors and foreign residents in the U.S.
Thus, the question remains – why should foreign companies like to move their production to the U.S. under all these negative institutional and behavioral (psychological) conditions? Even if President Trump recently has announced a 90-day pause on ‘reciprocal’ tariffs for most countries (but except China), uncertainty remains in place – also for foreign corporations with potential plans to invest in the U:S.
However, certain companies will do so all the same – but nobody knows how many of them indeed will take such a step in these uncertain times. Usually or often, poor or worsening institutional conditions turn out to be sufficient for refraining from a new foreign direct investment – but not in the last decades in
China as an outstanding exception.
Quite some time ago, I made a survey on this Chinese issue. The result was not very surprising – telling me that the enormous (potential) size of this giant market served as the main incentive for investing there despite the country’s political and institutional shortcomings. Maybe also then still existing good growth prospects (which under current conditions should not be the case in the U.S.). The same main argument of a market’s enormous size will probably be applied by the foreign companies that still want to invest in the U.S. – despite President Trump irrational behavior.
But how frequently will this happen?
Hubert Fromlet
Affiliate Professor at the School of Business and Economics, Linnaeus University