Karl P. Sauvant
German-born economist, law academic, and university teacher
Karl P. Sauvant (born 1944) is Senior Fellow at the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment (CCSI), and Lecturer in Law at the Center for International Commercial and Investment Arbitration, Columbia University, New York City. He was also Lecturer in Law at Columbia Law School between 2006 and 2023 and Co-director of the Millennium Cities Initiative (2006-2011). He was Director of the Investment and Enterprise Division at the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) from 2001 to 2005,
where, before that, he also served for many years as Chief of the research section.. In January 2006, Sauvant established with the support of Jeffrey D. Sachs the Columbia Center on Sustainable Investment. He served as its Executive Director until February 2012.
Sauvant is an expert in the field of foreign direct investment (FDI) and multinational enterprises, working on policies that increase the development benefits of FDI flows. He is known for a number of international initiatives and contributions to FDI research and policy. In 1991, as Chief of the Research Section of the United Nations Centre on Transnational Corporations (UNCTC), he created the World Investment Report, a prestigious annual report on FDI and development published by the United Nations, and was its team leader and lead author until 2004; the World Investment Report received, in 2020, the Academy of International Business Presidential Recognition Award, to “honor[ed] the 30th anniversary of the World Investment Report (WIR) and its contribution to the field of international business”.
He was founder and Editor-in-Chief of the Columbia FDI Perspectives (November 2008-November 2025, for 422 Perspectives), was co-founder and co-editor of
the United Nations Transnational Corporations journal,
and was founder and editor of the Yearbook on International Investment Law & Policy (2008-2012). He co-edited the documents of the Non-Aligned Countries (with Odette Jankowitsch—12 volumes) and the documents of the Group of 77 (with Joachim Müller—20 volumes) in what amounts to archives of the documents issued by these two groups of countries for the years involved.
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Chronology provides the most reliable spine for this subject; interpretation should follow only after identities and dates are secure. The source revision retrieved here is dated Sep 21, 2026. The linked authority identifier is Q93287501. VIAF identifies the subject as 94430258. The Library of Congress control number is n50015633. 2 of 3 selected statements include explicit references; 0 carry qualifiers and 0 use preferred rank. The first chronological checks are 1944, 2006, 2023 and 2011.
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This entry incorporates text from “Karl P. Sauvant” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.