For investors, one of the risks of operating in a foreign land is that your host government might decide to nationalise your assets. During the developmentalist period, global South governments often resorted to this tactic in their attempts to reclaim wealth from foreign control, nationalising land and even businesses owned by Western companies. When this happened to, say, American companies, their only recourse was to persuade the US government to retaliate by sending a blockade or staging a coup – which, as we know, they did on many occasions. It was a messy business, and politically risky:
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