Where foreign direct investment actually went

Investment announcements are marketing. Recorded investment flows are behaviour, and reading them tells you where returns were actually found.

Where the money went

Banking and finance, in the pre-2008 period, when European banking groups acquired Ukrainian banks and later wrote much of it off.

Agriculture and food processing, steadily, including some of the most successful investments made here.

Retail and consumer goods, following the growth of household incomes.

Manufacturing for export, particularly the wiring harness and component plants in the west, which are close to the border and labour-intensive.

And IT, which arrives as service contracts and development centres rather than as classic capital investment, and is therefore understated in the statistics.

The origin puzzle

A large share of recorded FDI arrives from a small number of jurisdictions used for holding structures. Much of this is Ukrainian capital returning through an offshore vehicle rather than genuinely foreign money.

That is worth knowing before quoting an FDI figure as evidence of foreign confidence.

The most reliable signal

Reinvested earnings: profit made here and put back rather than repatriated. That is a company voting with money it already has, and it is the least ambiguous indicator in the whole dataset.

What the pattern says

The successful investments were in sectors with a domestic market or a labour cost advantage, made by companies with an operating business rather than a portfolio position, and with management on the ground.

The gap between what investors say at a conference and where they put their money is one of the most honest indicators in this archive. I apply the same test to myself: not what I think about a market but how much capital I have tied up in it. Unlike statements of intent, the figures cannot be revised afterwards.