Jordan’s foreign direct investments mismatch: Why the currency peg, not visa rules, decides where capital goes

Jordan has made it cheaper for foreigners to win residency or citizenship by investing outside Amman earlier this summer, the latest push to nudge investors towards provinces. The Cabinet cut the provincial thresholds on the job-creating routes while raising the cost of the passive route that lets investors buy citizenship through the stock exchange, and a separate Real Estate Ownership Law opened land outside the cities’ planning zones to non-Jordanians for the first time. The goal is to send foreign money to build and hire in the governorates rather than sit in the capital.

Two very different kinds of foreign money reach Jordan. On one side is individual, small-ticket capital: Wealthy foreigners buying a passport or a residency by buying an apartment, investing in stocks, or setting up small businesses. On the other is big-project capital: Corporate FDI and the sovereign and institutional money behind ports, rail, and power. Jordan’s shortage was never of either — inflows rose 27% in 2025 to about JOD 1.5 bn (USD 2.1 bn), nearly a third of it from the GCC.

The caveat is where the money goes. Roughly a quarter of the total FDI stock sits in real estate, Amman-based economist Ibrahim Rihani tells EnterpriseAM. “That means a big chunk of FDI is going into non-tradable goods that [aren’t] necessarily productive. It lacks that competitive push,” he says.

Foreign money pools in property because the JOD’s peg to the USD makes almost everything else less attractive, Rihani tells us. To defend the peg, the state pays about 6% on government debt, which pulls bank lending toward safe paper and real estate and away from export-oriented ventures. And because the peg holds the JOD firm, a Jordanian manufacturer can’t adjust prices to be more competitive when a shock hits the way an Egyptian rival can under a floating EGP. “Banks recognize this risk and prefer not to lend to export-oriented firms exposed to foreign exchange risks,” Rihani says. “Instead, bank funding flows into real estate, which is shielded from international market volatility,” and foreign investors run the same calculation, he tells us.

The small-ticket money is what the rewrite is built for, and the global immigration advisory firm that advises on these visas says the discount barely figures in how buyers choose. Thresholds “are only one factor determining where investors ultimately deploy capital,” Henley & Partners tells EnterpriseAM, pointing instead to “the underlying commercial rationale, market access, infrastructure, workforce, and long-term viability of the investment.” Its read on incentives lands close to Rihani's, from the opposite side of the table: “Incentives can help shape investment decisions, but they operate alongside these broader economic considerations.”

What Jordan actually sells these buyers is a stable base in a rough neighborhood. Jordan’s draw, Henley & Partners argues, is “something that is not captured by passport rankings alone: a relatively stable regional base for families, businesses, and investments.” Jordan’s land registry data somewhat cements Henley & Partners’ point. Iraqis are historically the top investors in Jordanian real estate, and in the first eight months of 2026, they accounted for 43% of the overall value of real estate transactions made by foreigners.

And the sectors that could shift Jordan’s structure sit almost entirely outside the incentives on offer. Exporters in the free and development zones pay 0-5% tax against a standard 25%, a cushion that offsets the price penalty the peg imposes and marks out where foreign investors should be looking, Rihani argues. Pharma is the standout, built around exporters like Hikma and Dar Al-Dawa, and a wave of IT and cybersecurity graduates points to a second, less capital-hungry opportunity.

Some of it doesn’t even show up in the FDI numbers: Hikma raises money on the London Stock Exchange, so “capital raised by Hikma registers in London rather than domestic Jordanian FDI metrics, even though the operational impact is local.” And the domestic bourse has seized up. “Not a single company has gone public with an IPO since 2007,” Rihani says, adding that many equities trade below book value.

Infrastructure is where big foreign capital is still moving at decent scale. Rihani sees the megaprojects as insulated from the peg because their “primary financiers are development finance institutions lending at concessional, sub-commercial rates. Another driver is the GCC’s capital appetite to invest in these projects. “Gulf capital is the launch pad,” Saad Sahawneh, business development manager at Construction Management Associates, which tracks the pipeline, tells us.

What holds that pipeline back, on Sahawneh’s telling, is speed. “It was never the legal framework and never bankability,” he says, adding that the PPP law has stood since 2014 and Jordan has closed 45 projects since 1997. The real bottleneck is the seven years and roughly 10% of capex that big infrastructure projects need before they reach financial close, Sahawneh argues.

A case in point: The USD 6 bn Aqaba-Amman water desalination and conveyance project is a good example of a successful but painfully slow infrastructure project. “That [project] had the strongest lender bench any Jordanian project has ever assembled, and it is now stepping toward financial close. It has also taken years to get there, because the traditional model stacks study on study and every counterparty waits for the layer below. Nothing about Jordan slowed it down. The model did,” he tells us.

And then you have projects that are de-risked by GCC sovereign money and state capital commitment. Sahawneh points to the mine-to-port Aqaba railway project, a USD 2.3 bn mine-to-port link structured as a 50-50 joint venture between UAE’s Etihad Rail on one end, and Jordanian mining and port companies and pension funds on the other. “Because the consortium existed before the project did and the deal sat inside a USD 5.5 bn bilateral package, agreements were signed in April 2026, with financial close targeted for early 2027 and trains running in 2030,” he says.

The bottomline: The money that buys passports and apartments is small, lifestyle money, largely indifferent to the discount Jordan just sharpened. The money that builds ports and factories is big and productive, and it moves on procurement speed, local-currency finance, and the cost of borrowing, none of which a residency-for-investment law touches.