Protection of Foreign Investment in Context

This book represents an unprecedented effort to explore Nigeria"s principal investment laws in the context of international law and practice. It employs decisions of international tribunals, especially the International Centre for the Settlement of Investment Disputes (ICSID), to facilitate an understanding of how Nigeria"s investment laws, investment treaties, and petroleum agreements protect foreign investment. It also foregrounds specific constitutional and administrative law issues intimately related to the protection of foreign investment in Nigeria, and discusses them with the aid of comparative analysis. Furthermore, this book critically analyzes regulating foreign investment by means of a multilateral agreement on investment (MAI) and offers policy suggestions that should inspire negotiations on a MAI from the perspective of a developing country like Nigeria. The central themes of this book are that the liberalization of the legal landscape for foreign investment is not by itself the silver bullet for winning and retaining high volume of FDI and that a future MAI should consist of “smart” and forward-looking rules, which balance the commercial interests of capital-exporting countries against the development needs of capital-importing countries.