Who sells? Trends and determinants of citizenship by investment 1960-2022

Organised by

• Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
• GGP: Global Governance Programme
• GlobalCit: Global Citzenship Observatory

'Passports-for-purchase’ have become a global phenomenon in recent years, raising questions on the nature of political membership among scholars, and causing controversy in real-life politics. This practice is enabled through citizenship by investment (CBI), broadly defined as the granting of citizenship in exchange for financial payment or economic investment. CBI can be based on a single generic legal provision in the citizenship law of a country, or a fully developed specific programme. In both cases, there is limited theoretical and empirical knowledge of why countries introduce investor citizenship. To investigate what makes it likely for a country to put its citizenship up for sale and why countries do this in different ways, a theoretical framework has been developed that accounts for the main characteristics of states introducing a subtype of CBI. These claims are then supported with a novel longitudinal and global dataset capturing the existence and main characteristics of CBI programmes between 1960 and 2022.