Discussing and analysing past events is important as it enables us to learn from, grow and build on our experience. These discussions should not be aimed at, as they too often are, assigning blame to anyone, but should rather be focused on identifying the challenges that we either neglected due to limited amount of human and other resources or have arisen on their own due to the outside events. But as much as we do like to discuss and explore reasons for a specific challenge that we have to tackle, it is our belief that we at the AmCham Slovenia’s community and especially the Investment Committee that I co-chair, prefer to talk about the future and in concreto.
In the past years the AmCham Slovenia’s Investment Committee, and this goes also for other committees that discuss social, environmental and economical challenges and solutions from their field of expertise, focused on the areas of our socio-economic wellbeing that would address the challenges that have been exposed by the globalisation and the last major financial crisis. In recent times our focus slowly expanded towards looking for the solutions for the society and economy in the digital age, which was additionally boosted by the Covid-19 pandemic.
The future investment environment in Slovenia thus heavily depends on all of us, namely the society as a whole, the politics and all other stakeholders (NGO’s, unions, public and private sector), reaching a consensus on the most pressing topics. As our Investment Committee focuses on addressing the issue of attractiveness of Slovenian economy from the perspective of foreign and domestic investors, we proposed various solutions that may be implemented rather quickly. Among them are proposals that aim at de-bureaucratizing the Slovenian regulatory environment (we do not understand de-bureaucratization as the need to lower the social and environmental standards, but as measures that aim at simplifying processes and access to regulators), implementation of a golden visa scheme, revisiting the FDI control mechanism and many more.
All these solutions represent an important building block of a more open and attractive investment environment, however the next chapter of our socio-economic development will require from us to look deeper. This is why the Investment Committee is thrilled that AmCham Slovenia soon hosts a conference that will offer an overview of existing investment opportunities in Slovenia and will set the grounds for ambitious discussions on expending those in the future, especially in the basic economic sector that form the backbone of Slovenia’s future social, environmental and economical development.
