A New Zealand autonomous electric vehicle startup moves its HQ to California across enough time zones to make your head spin. Another New Zealand-founded company aims to establish a “one-stop space shop” in Maryland. The critical mass of aging populations begins to be felt in making global location decisions. Advisors with a global consultancy based in Switzerland offer exclusive insights from inside Ukraine about signs of business investment promise since the Russian invasion. The economic development chief for the only state governor who went to Davos analyzes EV competition from China. And a surfeit of foreign direct investment bolsters the economies of top-performing states, metropolitan and micropolitan areas even as some of them are wary of corporate investment, however capitalist it might be, from certain countries (yes, China again).

All of this and more is found in the 232 pages of this issue of Site Selection, always our most anticipated issue of the year because it’s our first opportunity to look at calendar year 2023 data totals from the proprietary Conway Projects Database, our scorecard of corporate end-user facility investment projects around the world that’s populated year-round by our research team of Karen Medernach, Brian Espinoza and McKenzie Wright.

Their work and the work of our team of journalists, designers and sales directors is oriented toward the same thing our founder Mac Conway liked to think about: the whole world. It’s a good reminder to connect to that world and fight off the urge toward parochialism, paranoia or “small-town thinking” … a type of thinking that, as many Site Selection readers have no doubt experienced, is not confined to small towns.

In essence, whether a company is a locally nurtured startup or a multinational conglomerate from India, commerce, trade and fruitful partnerships are global whether you like it or not. They’re local too. More than one thing can be true at the same time.

The local/global nexus is the driving force behind the City and State Diplomacy program at the Truman Center for National Policy, designed to “support the international engagement and global initiatives of local actors” and in doing so, expand “the voices and ownership of U.S. foreign policy, to ensure that diplomacy serves all Americans.” The deputy director of the program is Max Bouchet, who previously served as senior policy analyst and senior project manager at the Center for Sustainable Development at the Brookings Institution. Before that he served this publication and our parent company as chief analyst.

“Going global matters more than ever for local communities,” Max tells me. “This is a long-term game in which local leaders must cultivate relationships over time to position their regions in global flows of investments, goods, talent and ideas. This requires collaboration across business, academia and government in a cohesive international strategy informed by evidence and data, like the insights you’ll find in this edition of Site Selection.”

Hey, he said it, not me.