The Government has a website (New Zealand Now) that markets New Zealand to the world as “a great place to live, invest and do business”.

A great many New Zealanders, including the strongest opponents of foreign investment, would probably agree.

Yet the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) has assessed that New Zealand has one of least welcoming foreign direct investment (FDI) regimes. Specifically, 49 countries out of the 55 assessed, have less restrictive regimes than New Zealand.

Of the included nations, New Zealand is more restrictive than all the ex-Soviet Union states, Latin American, and Middle-East countries, bar Saudi Arabia. China, Indonesia, India and Japan complete the list of five countries that are more restrictive than New Zealand.

These results should worry us. Countries that are more restrictive on the OECD’s measure tend to be, unsurprisingly, less successful in attracting foreign investment. It also reports that most empirical studies conclude that FDI increases both factor productivity and income growth in the host countries relative to what domestic investment would normally add.

What’s more worrisome is that New Zealand has become less competitive over the years. Its score in 2012 is the same as it was in 1997, while other countries have been gaining ground. In 1997, 10 countries were more restrictive than New Zealand. Since then, Turkey, Mexico, Canada, Korea and Australia have all surpassed us.

Indeed, as New Zealand’s ranking has deteriorated, FDI inflows into New Zealand have trended down as a percentage of GDP. Between 1993 and 2012, the average rate of decline was 0.2% of GDP annually. Of course, this is only suggestive because other factors will have been operating.

Delving deeper into the OECD’s overall rankings shows that New Zealand stands out for having the most restrictive screening and prior approval requirements of all 55 countries. Significantly, no less than 35 of the 55 countries have no measured restrictions in this category. If New Zealand joined this group, it could potentially become one of the 20 least restrictive countries overall.

The OECD’s 2009 Survey of New Zealand recommended eliminating screening restrictions or, at the very least, reversing the burden of proof so that government would have to demonstrate economic harm before rejecting an investment proposal.

And why not? After all, ‘innocent until proven guilty’ is a bedrock principle of our judicial system.