Investment Report

Jordanian citizenship was granted to 65 investors during the first half of the current year, compared to 29 investors during the same period in 2025, and the approved applications were linked to investments amounting to about 72.3 million dinars, in addition to granting citizenship to 250 family members of investors.

That is fine, although the writer of this column still supports granting long-term residency to investors and their families, and not just that, there is also a question in mind: why do we not work to make Jordan a distinguished place for living, attracting retirees and the affluent from around the world, where they can own property and live a luxurious life prepared for them in tourist areas, and perhaps start small projects where licensing does not pass through the knots of bureaucracy, occupancy permits, zoning, and others? You get all of this, but with a ease that generates the conviction that Jordan is truly a suitable place to live.

Everything is fine: the legislative environment, facilities, transactions, and procedures. Despite all this, we still suffer from the difficulty of attracting large and diverse investments, while the majority of investments, both small and large, are concentrated in real estate and numerous restaurant services, while we also see that the government is the largest investor in major projects.

There are 327 projects that benefited from investment incentives, and as we had previously demanded, following up on these projects and where they have reached, whether they were actually implemented or not implemented, why they were not implemented, and what the obstacles are—new projects, expansions, and development operations for existing projects—from incentives and exemptions during the first half,

The expected future investment volume reached about 711.2 million dinars, compared to 308 projects during the same period of 2025.

I do not know why it is expected and not certain, and we have nothing to do but to be optimistic and wait for the fulfillment of these expectations.

Investment facilitation transactions, which include new investment decisions, exemptions, follow-up, and post-investment services, rose from 2,992 transactions during the first half of 2025 to 3,801 transactions during the same period of 2026, while the Ministry completed 3,153 follow-up transactions and 260 Jordanian certificates of origin.

This is a positive statistic pointed out from the report, and development zones recorded remarkable performance, as the total volume of investments in them rose from about 5.819 billion dinars to nearly 6.9 billion dinars during the first half of 2026, with a growth rate of 18.79 percent.

The number of job opportunities provided by these zones increased from about 117 thousand to nearly 123 thousand jobs, an increase of nearly 6 thousand job opportunities. Competition to win investment flows has widened, and there are players who have shifted from being a source of investment to an importer of it with generous capabilities and attraction factors.

All that is required is to reduce investment costs, either through incentives or in the cost of establishing projects and operating them later.