Reports & Intelligence

Research that starts with the question that matters.

Reports, field notes, and features for practitioners responsible for investment, trade, and economic growth. Each piece is built around a clear finding and the decision it changes.

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16%44%

Strategic sectors' share of greenfield FDI, 2020 → 2025 — one of ten shifts remaking the profession.

File 11 · Research reportStructural shifts

Ten Rewirings

The profession still runs a 2000s playbook; the ground beneath it has moved. Ten structural shifts — in the data and the law — that most see in pieces but haven't connected.

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C$13B300 jobs

One gigawatt-scale data-centre deal, July 2026. Jobs alone cannot explain the public value at stake.

File 10 · Research reportFree

The Capture Gap

AI is weakening the link between productive capability, employment, and shared prosperity. A new framework for measuring—and securing—value retained.

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$77M1 job

The largest public subsidy per job on record — tax breaks for a data center that created one permanent position.

File 07 · FeatureThe divided economy

Special K

When capital stops needing workers, the incentive that anchors the deal becomes a one-way transfer to the top of the K.

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The barrier is not a missing tool. It is a missing person.

File 08 · FeatureCareer

Somebody Has to Go First

Why AI adoption stalls on ownership, mandate, and policy—and how one credible use case can break the impasse.

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More reports

US$0.0T

Projected family-office AUM by 2030 — growing faster than any other pool of capital.

File 01 · Research reportFree

Engaging Asian Family Offices for FDI

Who they are, how they decide, and what investment promotion must do differently to win a new class of private capital.

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AI moves the premium from producing material to judging it.

File 02 · FeatureAI & work

We're All Analysts Now

Why the human who judges the output is now the scarce ingredient in the workflow.

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31

Economics, Security and Geopolitics — three forces, now braided into one operating environment.

File 03 · FeatureGeopolitics

The New ESG

The old ESG was a reporting framework. The new one decides which jurisdictions make the shortlist.

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National AI ambition, turned into firm-level export work.

File 04 · Field noteAI & work

Korea's AI Export Training Model

A practical formula for SME adoption — moving AI from national policy to the factory floor.

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The real AI risk in this profession is a slow-moving employer.

File 05 · FeatureCareer

Don't Let Them Leave You Behind

How to push your agency forward — and what to train on your own if it won't move fast enough.

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Turning market knowledge into trusted access.

File 06 · ReportTradecraft

Commercial Diplomacy & Relationship Tradecraft

AI can write the market brief. The career-defining skill is everything that happens in the room.

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~8,000~580

What a disciplined monitor scans in a week versus what it keeps. The system creates value through selection.

File 09 · FeatureAI & work

Stop Waiting for the Digest

How to replace the passive digest with an intelligence system that searches, filters, and judges by rule.

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Latest briefMonday, 27 July 2026

A 45 percent jump in foreign investment sounds like a win until you read what is inside it. Romania's boom last year was mostly reinvested profit and inter-company loans, and telling that apart from real new capital is a skill every promotion officer can learn.

Romania beat all of Eastern Europe on FDI in 2025, then watched the flow cool this spring. The number an agency celebrates and the number that signals a healthy pipeline are rarely the same, and the craft is refusing to let one figure answer the wrong question. Plus global FDI ticks up while factory greenfield thins, South Africa leans on its zones, India opens e-commerce investment for exports, Indonesia hunts another gigawatt of data centre, and Mexico and Brazil test their trade deal.

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