Owning Thy Self

There is a big deal to be made whether a country owns itself. if a country relies to heavily on foreign investment, and said country begins to look unstable, then foreign countries begin to pull their money out of that country. Some would argue that this is a big reason why Canada has never became a superpower in the world. Canada relies very heavily on foreign investment, and foreign investors are not willing to keep their money invested in foreign investments that show any signs of weakness. Whereas the patriotic spirit of staying in for the long run, is common when someone invests in their own national economy. This is a big reason why Cooperatives start up. Within a cooperative, the only people investing in the company are those that have genuine reasons (not purely monetary reasons) for investing in the company. These people are typically employees or frequent users of the company, who view it as more than just a capitalistic enterprise.

However, in the global world we rely heavily on foreign investment because its so much easier to get, and it allows a company to have more money than in would if it only asked for domestic investors.

This graph illustrates the percentage of foreign investment as a percentage of GDP for 15 countries. I chose the 13 richest countries in the world, and also included venezuela and Cuba because they would seemingly defy the need for foreign investment. if a countries number is 0.4, that means that 40 percent of that countries wealth comes from abroad.

The numbers for Canada are quite alarming! Canada comes in 4th place for most reliance from abroad, with a number of 41%. Whereas countries like Japan and India only rely on 3 percent of their GDP from FDI. Venezual is surpisingly only tied with Russia and Japan at 13 % (You'd think Chavez wouldn't even accept foreign dollars).

We should not feel comfartable that Canada is not as bad as the UK. The European Union can be treated as one country, and therefore when france invests in the UK, it could still be considered domestic investment on some level. The UK has an allabye for being so high, and that is that investment from other European countries is not entirely considered foreign. If you look closer at the graph and omit the european nations, Canada now comes dead last.