We’ve been checking in with the Kearney FDI Confidence Index since it was created in the late 1990s. Its newest iteration came out this spring, showing a flight to safety, a concern about onerous data regulations abroad, and a pronounced drop in optimism about the three-year outlook from business leaders, from 72% in spring 2020 to 57% now.

When it comes to countries as investment destinations, they are most confident investing in the United States, Canada, UK, Germany and Japan, in that order. A pronounced cooling attitude toward Asia was evident in the top 25 countries, with China, Singapore and South Korea each dropping four spots from last year’s rankings, to Nos. 12, 16 and 21, respectively.

As for factors affecting investment decision-making, we found the list (above) to be a very familiar one, echoing Site Selection’s own recent lists (example below) of most important site selection factors among corporate end users and consultants. Kearney’s perspective and the organization’s separate Global Cities Index are featured in the forthcoming Global Best to Invest rankings in the May issue of Site Selection, to be posted next Monday in this space. — Adam Bruns

We’ll keep this short and sweet, like a bite out of an Apple: Check out the full April 26th announcement from the technology giant about the $430 billion in U.S. investments it plans to make and 20,000 U.S. jobs it plans to create over the next five years, including a major billion-dollar-plus new campus in Raleigh, North Carolina.

This week marked the 35th anniversary of the Chernobyl disaster in the then-USSR, now Ukraine. It killed 28 immediately, and some experts predict it total death toll could reach 4,000 when cancer and other radiation-caused illnesses are taken into account. In 2017 we covered the plan by China’s GCL Group to install a massive 1-gigawatt solar power plant at the site, where a French consortium named Novarka was seven years into construction of a giant sarcophagus to encase the stricken site (declared a tourism attraction in 2011). Novarka’s $1.6 billion project was completed in July 2019 (when this photograph with a well-placed rainbow was made) after 12 years and 33 million hours of what Novarka partner VINCI Construction Grands Projets called “unique building work.” Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky attended that ceremony, and he returned to Chernobyl on Tuesday to commemorate the anniversary and to license a new Interim Spent Fuel Dry Storage Facility now operating at the site. “Today,” he said, “our goal is to transform the exclusion area — that’s what we say about Chernobyl — into the area of rebirth.”