Who’s selling? Trends and determinants of citizenship-by-investment programmes around the world, 1960-2020

Over the past decades, an increasing number of countries worldwide have introduced so-called citizenship-by-investment (CBI) programmes, which offer citizenship in return for financial payment or economic investment. While there is much controversy about the normative question whether citizenship should be for sale, the empirical study of the determinants of the introduction of investor citizenship programmes remains limited. To investigate why some countries put their citizenship up for sale, whereas others do not, we analyse a novel longitudinal and global dataset that captures the presence and main characteristics of CBI programmes between 1960 and 2020. We find that in 2020, twenty per cent of countries in the world have investor citizenship schemes with higher rates in the Americas, Europe and Oceania and a lower prevalence in Asia and Africa. Adopting a supply-demand logic, we hypothesise that the propensity to have CBI programmes in place is driven by political regime and economic development. While, on the one hand, developed economies will attract greater interest from citizenship investors due to the mobility privileges associated with citizenship from countries higher in the global hierarchy, middle-income countries, on the other hand, are more likely to have to rely on such programmes for economic growth than high-income countries. Moreover, while citizenship of a democratic country should be more attractive to investors, we expect that political constraints in liberal democracies makes the introduction of these controversial programmes less likely than in electoral democracies. We test these hypotheses with panel data analysis of country-level determinants associated with CBI programmes. We conclude the paper with reflections on the comparative research agenda on investor citizenship.