On the eve of Prime Minister Narendra Modi’s visit to the US, here’s a chart that shows the foreign direct investment stock in India and China, as a percentage of their gross domestic product. Note that the stock of FDI as a percentage of GDP peaked for China in 1999 at 16.9% and has been going lower since then as the economy expands. What this seems to show is that FDI was very important for China in the nineties but has become far less so. If we follow the same trajectory, we are now around where China was in 1994, in terms of FDI stock as a percentage of GDP. The percentage should grow in the next few years, before falling off as the FDI acts as a catalyst for the growth of the rest of the economy.