Obama announces new measures to lure more foreign investment

U.S. President Barack Obama on Monday announced a series of new measures to lure more foreign investment and bolster economic recovery.

"We're launching a new partnership between state and federal economic development officials. We're launching the SelectUSA Academy, with online and on-site training programs for investors. We're improving our online investment tools, helping companies identify state-based incentives so that they can decide where to invest," Obama said at the 2015 SelectUSA Investment Summit held at National Harbor in the Washington D.C. metro area.

The Obama administration created SelectUSA four years ago as part of a U.S. government-wide initiative to attract more foreign direct investment (FDI) to the United States and the first SelectUSA Investment Summit was held in 2013.

Summit participants have already announced at least 13 billion U.S. dollars in U.S. investments over the last year and an estimated 32,500 new U.S. jobs, according to a fact sheet released by the White House touting the success of the new initiative.

Building on that momentum, the Obama administration vowed to expand the SelectUSA initiative to make it easier for global companies to invest in the United States and attract more FDI. "My administration is going to reform the L-1B visa category, which allows corporations to temporarily move workers from a foreign office to a U.S. office in a faster, simpler way," said the president, adding that the U.S. Congress also needs to "get immigration reform done."

U.S. Secretary of Commerce Penny Pritzker will also establish the first-ever federal advisory committee to solicit formal input on the development and implementation of strategies and programs to attract and retain foreign direct investment in the United States, the White House said.

The steadily improving U.S. economy has become one of the bright spots of the fragile world economic recovery and attracted more potential investors to the world's largest economy.

"America's economic resurgence is real - and there is no better time to invest in our country," Pritzker said earlier in the opening remarks to kick off the two-day summit, noting that foreign businesses have injected an average of 67 billion U.S. dollars into U.S. economy over each of the last three quarters.

China has become the fastest growing source of FDI for the United States with an average annual growth rate of 41 percent from 2009 to 2013, according to the Commerce Department. But the total amount is small, only accounting for less than 1 percent of the U.S. total FDI.

Chinese investment in the United States has been rising rapidly in recent years and it will remain bullish in the future despite some friction, Vinai Thummalapally, executive director of the SelectUSA, told Xinhua in an interview.

The United States and China are negotiating a bilateral investment treaty to encourage greater cross-border investment flows and strengthen economic ties between the world's two largest economies.

The 2015 SelectUSA Investment Summit attracted over 2,600 participants, including 1,300 companies from over 70 countries and regions as well as over 500 U.S. economic development officials across the country. China tops the list of delegations for this year's Summit with about 150 investors from the Chinese mainland and Hong Kong. Enditem