Hungarian Investment Promotion Agency

IBM-Plant Location International (PLI) started to develop the Global Location Trends database in 2002. This database tracks announced decisions of companies to local new operations in regions outside of their HQ region/country on an on-going basis. Additional investment project data is received and integrated from other specialised FDI databases, investment promotion agencies and economic development organizations around the world. IBM-PLI screens almost half a million announcements and projects on an annual basis. The analysis of volumes focuses on job creation, which is the best indicator of the local economic impact of the investment.

Based on the recently published database data for 2017, Hungary has achieved remarkable results in the three main categories measuring job creation from various aspects. As a result of the record-number of FDI investments, Hungary ranked 17th in the world taking overall job creation into account, which means 7th position in Europe, ahead of such countries and economies as Spain or Italy. These new positions, the number of which exceeds 17,500, constituted 1.6% of the jobs created globally in 2017.

In the category in which the created new positions are proportioned to the number of people in the country (new jobs/one million inhabitants), Hungary has achieved another 7th place. The fierce competition is well illustrated by the fact that only countries with a smaller population than Hungary are ahead of us in this comparison.

The last category of job creation examines the added value of the new positions from the perspective of the national economy. In this respect, Hungary continues to be among the top 20 countries in the world, ranked 16th, making it number one in the region and higher than the United States, South Korea and Austria among others.

2017 was a record-breaking year for the HIPA Hungarian Investment Promotion Agency in every respect: job creation, total number of projects and total value generated by the investments. IBM-PLI shares this opinion and has registered 121 new projects in its database, which is a new record for Hungary since they started monitoring these data in 2002.

The automotive industry forms the backbone of the Hungarian national economy, and has the biggest share of the projects handled by HIPA. Moreover, in 2017, we moved to fifth place in the world (Nr 1 in Europe), thus joining the top destination countries for the transportation equipment sector in job creation.