Every country wants its own investment-screening regime

SINGAPORE BECAME the latest country to erect barriers to investment in the name of national security on November 3rd. It plans to review, and potentially block, investments in entities “critical to Singapore’s national-security interests”. That should come as little surprise to dealmakers from the free-trading city-state who have watched the proliferation of similar policies abroad. Last year Singaporean firms filed more notices with the Committee on Foreign Investment in the United States (CFIUS), America’s powerful inbound-investment watchdog, than investors from any other country. That includes China, whose globetrotting companies have been the primary target of efforts to beef up existing investment-screening regimes and adopt new ones. A report from the OECD, a club of mostly rich countries, calls this protectionist turn “historically unprecedented”.