Today’s economies are shaped by many rapidly changing factors: military conflicts, political influences, business behaviour and natural resource constraints. As globalisation and technology shape new patterns of economic activity, competition between countries is intensifying to attract investment and position themselves in international trade. Attracting investment to a country, according to economic scholars, is not only a prerequisite for capital and job creation (Kukaj et al, 2022), but also ensures the adoption of innovations and technologies (Nguyen et al, 2023), growth in export volumes (Ernst & Young, 2023) and economic development (Abbas et al, 2024). Ernst & Young’s European Attractiveness Study (Ernst & Young, 2023) identifies modern investment as the start of a new generation of investment, as each economic and geopolitical shock increases uncertainties, rendering countries’ or companies’ development strategies that have been successful in the past ineffective. The relationship between uncertainties and investment attraction is not a new topic in the academic literature, but recent geopolitical events have increased the interest of researchers in how different uncertainties affect macroeconomic performance. The World Economic Forum’s Global Risks Report 2025 identifies military conflicts, the environment and disinformation as the main current threats (World Economic Forum, 2025). In the long term, these risks will have a particularly strong impact on global economic processes, the report points out. For these reasons, the accelerating pace of global trends and uncertainty about the future pose a challenge for countries to closely monitor and assess the attractiveness of their economies to investors, with a view to achieving moderate economic development and growth. Despite Lithuania’s remarkable success in attracting more and more foreign direct investment in recent years, sustaining foreign investment in the future is important for the country’s continued economic growth. The aim of the study is to identify the factors that have the strongest impact on attracting investment in Lithuania in the context of current developments.
The research problem is: how are contemporary changes changing Lithuania’s attractiveness to foreign investors?
The research methods include comparative analysis of scientific literature, content analysis and systematisation and generation of conclusions, analysis of official statistical data, correlation analysis.
Project results:
The study will highlight the factors of investment attractiveness assessment in the context of contemporary changes, as presented in the recent scientific literature, which will allow for a comparison of how the changing circumstances influence investors’ decision-making. The analysis of the academic literature will be complemented by a content analysis: evaluation of press releases, communication messages, strategic documents and reviews. This will highlight Lithuania’s uniqueness and reveal the transformation of Lithuania’s investment attractiveness assessment.
Period of project implementation: 2025-07-01 - 2025-08-31
Project coordinator: Kaunas University of Technology
