On Friday, 11 September, the 24th high-level meeting of the government of Latvia and Foreign Investors Council in Latvia (FICIL) took place, at which this year special emphasis was laid on such matters as strengthening justice, stability of the tax policy, the improvement and digitisation of the health care system. Also, the general economic situation was discussed along with preconditions for attracting new investments. “Our aim is to attract foreign direct investments in the amount of at least 400 million euro until 2023, therefore we wish to take all the necessary steps to provide a favourable environment for business development and to ensure that enterprises with foreign capital that already operate in Latvia would continue their development. Experience shows that investment environment largely depends on how good and comfortable in Latvia feel enterprises that already operate here,” indicates the Director of Investment and Development Agency of Latvia (IDAL) Kaspars Rozkalns. Throughout the eight months of 2020 IDAL has attracted 31 investment projects to Latvia, which will create the total of 1700 workplaces, but the total amount of investments will exceed 100 million euro. With regard to Covid-19 and the Belarusian crisis IDAL has consulted over 5000 customers. Reacting to the economic situation state aid instruments administered by IDAL have been reviewed and adjusted to present needs, for example, opportunities in the field of digitisation of enterprises and acquiring new export markets have been broadened.
To achieve the set goals and restore growth in the near future, investments in human capital, innovations and the infrastructure necessary for entrepreneurship must continue. In addition to the aforementioned, to stimulate development of the national economy investments must be made in public infrastructure, for which additional funds will be available from EU stabilisation programmes. State and EU investments will definitely be followed also by private investments.
“Meeting representatives of FICIL we wish to coordinate further steps to provide entrepreneurship environment that would attract enterprises. At the same time we invite enterprises to participate more actively in industries’ ecosystems, in which currently entrepreneurs, organisations of entrepreneurs, public authorities and universities are coming together to decide on things required to further faster growth of industries,” tells K. Rozkalns.
