This week, I had the chance to interview Andrea Marín Odio, Project Manager and Legal Policy Analyst at OECD. Andrea started her early career first in the private sector as legal advisor and then moved to the public sector as advisor to two Ministers and a Congressman in Costa Rica. After a spell as a Compliance Analyst at General Electric in Europe, Hungary, she is now shaping global investment policy through her work at the OECD where she deals with governance and accession-related issues and leads regional initiatives and capacity building to help countries improve their investment frameworks. With nearly 20 years of experience across the public and private sectors, she brings expertise in international policy and negotiations, navigating the complex intersections of economic policy and investment law.
Her role spans from coordinating country reviews and accession processes in the area of investment to steering the governance of the OECD Investment Committee and its legal instruments. She also leads the LAC Investment Initiative, driving policy dialogue on foreign investment and cooperation across Latin America, while advancing projects on FDI, cross-border services, and capital flows worldwide.
You started your career in the private sector and worked as a compliance professional for an international corporation. How did your background in compliance—the 'on-the-ground' reality—shape your approach to designing international investment policies and legal frameworks at the OECD?
My early years in the private sector, and later in compliance, gave me something that is difficult to acquire from a purely policy perspective: a clear understanding of what policies look like once they reach the ground.
I spent years helping businesses navigate complex laws and regulations and seeing how policies are not created in a vacuum. They have real consequences for companies, workers and communities. Many policies are designed with entirely legitimate public objectives in mind, but the challenge is sometimes translating those objectives into rules that work effectively in practice. My work consisted in helping businesses adapt to those realities while also communicating their concerns and practical challenges back to policymakers.
A regulation that may look straightforward on paper can end up creating significant costs, uncertainty or barriers when implemented, while a well-designed framework can build trust, strengthen confidence and support investment and growth.
Governments regulate for good reasons. They are balancing public interests, development priorities, institutional capacity and, increasingly, international commitments. The challenge is not that these objectives are incompatible, but that gaps can emerge between policy design and implementation.
That was one of the things that drew me into the public sector. I wanted to contribute to bridging that gap by bringing the perspectives of businesses and citizens into policy discussions, while also helping stakeholders better understand the objectives and constraints governments face.
Having grown up in a developing country, I have always been interested in understanding why some countries are able to create opportunities and prosperity more effectively than others, and how public policy can help narrow that gap. Over time, that curiosity evolved into a professional commitment to helping governments design policies that are both practical and effective.
It also changed how I think about investment policy. Investors do not assess a single regulation in isolation. They look at the overall investment climate: regulatory predictability, institutional quality, transparency, infrastructure, skills, access to markets and the practical ease of operating over the long term.
That perspective continues to shape my work at the OECD. I believe investment frameworks need to do more than attract capital. They need to create the conditions for investment to contribute to broader development objectives, whether that is creating quality jobs, strengthening local capabilities, supporting innovation or advancing sustainable growth. Ultimately, effective investment policy is about aligning the needs of governments, investors and society. When that alignment exists, investment can become a powerful tool for development.
In your transition from compliance professional in the private sector to policy analyst working for an international organization, what was the steepest learning curve, and what skill from your earlier career has been the most surprisingly useful?
The steepest learning curve was probably learning patience. In the private sector, once you have identified the right course of action, you can often move quickly. In policymaking, that is rarely the case. Good policy requires consulting a wide range of stakeholders, balancing competing interests, and building genuine consensus. And consensus, especially in an international organisation working across countries with different levels of development, policy objectives and priorities, rarely happens overnight.
As for the most surprisingly useful skill, I would point to the thoroughness and attention to detail I developed during my formative years at an international law firm. Back then, I was acutely aware that there was a great deal of money at stake, and that precision mattered enormously. It is easy to lose sight of that discipline once you move into policymaking, where the stakes can feel more abstract. But the truth is, a lack of clarity in a legal instrument, policy recommendation or assessment can create uncertainty and have real consequences for governments, businesses and citizens. That early discipline of getting the detail right has stayed with me, and it continues to shape how I approach drafting, negotiations and policy analysis today.
When you described your job, you said that your work has focused on working with countries to help them improve their legal frameworks to attract more (and better) investment, in accordance with their policy objectives. How do you achieve that?
The starting point is that we do not simply focus on helping countries attract more investment. We help them attract the kind of investment that supports their development objectives and delivers tangible benefits for their economies and societies.
The Investment Committee's work is built around a simple but powerful idea: more, better and safe investment. More investment can bring capital, jobs and opportunities. Better investment can support productivity, innovation, skills and sustainable development. And safe investment requires transparent, predictable and well-governed frameworks that give both investors and governments the confidence to make long-term commitments.
Our role, particularly when working with non-Members, is to help translate those principles into policies and legal frameworks that reflect each country's circumstances and priorities. We start by understanding what a country is trying to achieve, and then look at whether its investment framework is giving it the tools to get there.
What I value about the OECD approach is that it is not about offering a one-size-fits all model for countries to copy. It is about helping them build frameworks that are open, predictable and fit for purpose, while ensuring that investment contributes to their own policy ambitions. Ultimately, success is not measured by attracting investment alone, but by whether that investment helps improve people's lives and supports sustainable development.
With increasing geopolitical tensions, what are the biggest legal challenges you see countries facing when balancing open investment policies with national security and economic interests?
This is actually an area where my colleagues and I have been paying very close attention. In particular, colleagues specialising in national security have been tracking the growing number of measures adopted by governments to review or restrict foreign investment on national security grounds.
The broader context is that the geopolitical environment has changed significantly. We are seeing greater strategic competition among major powers, sometimes selective application of international rules, rising economic nationalism, ongoing conflicts, and increasingly uneven technological development. These trends are reshaping value chains, investment flows and strategic partnerships around the world.
Today's world is neither bipolar nor multipolar, but rather an unstable balance of accumulated tensions. The rules and assumptions that underpinned the global economy for much of the last 50 years are evolving, creating greater uncertainty for both governments and investors.
One consequence is that governments are paying much closer attention to who is investing, in which sectors, and for what purpose. We see this very clearly in the OECD's work. The number of investment screening mechanisms among OECD countries has roughly tripled since 2009, with particularly strong growth following the pandemic and the war in Ukraine. At the same time, the range of sectors subject to national security scrutiny has expanded significantly, from a relatively narrow focus in the past to areas such as critical infrastructure, advanced technologies, energy, health and data.
The challenge for governments is finding the right balance. Countries have every right, and indeed a responsibility, to protect their national security and other essential interests. But they also need to remain open to investment, because investment remains a critical source of growth, innovation and development.
This is where international organisations such as the OECD can play an important part. In a context of growing tensions, common rules, transparency and opportunities for dialogue become more, not less, important. Ultimately, the objective is to ensure that legitimate security concerns are addressed without unnecessarily undermining the openness and confidence on which investment depends.
Based on your experience, what are the most significant hurdles countries face when reforming their investment laws, and how do you help them navigate those roadblocks?
I think one of the biggest hurdles is that investment reform is rarely just a technical exercise. More often than not, it involves balancing competing interests. There are usually protections, preferences or long-standing arrangements that certain groups have an interest in maintaining, while governments are looking at reforms that could generate broader benefits for the economy and society as a whole.
This is where we can be particularly valuable. We work hand in hand with governments and stakeholders to understand those different perspectives, look at the evidence, and identify which policy options are most consistent with the country's own objectives. Our job is not to tell countries what to do, but to help them understand the trade-offs, assess the likely impacts of different choices, and build support for reforms that can deliver long-term benefits.
As I mentioned earlier, this requires a great deal of constructive dialogue and consensus-building. Reform can take time, particularly when it affects established interests. But I see that as a necessary part of good policymaking rather than a weakness of the process.
Even in what many describe as a “post-truth” world, I remain optimistic about the power of evidence. Robust data and rigorous analysis do not eliminate political choices or trade-offs, but they give us a shared basis on which to have a more constructive conversation about them.
If you let me one personal question: you are a person with tremendous experience who worked as a parliamentary advisor in Costa Rica, a compliance analyst in Budapest and now as a legal policy analyst and project manager at the OECD. What was the moment what you regard as the biggest achievement in your career path?
That is a nice question, because I do not think my career has been particularly linear. Looking back, I can now draw a line through it and see how the different experiences connect, but at the time many of them felt like leaps of faith.
I see my career as a series of small achievements and choices that gradually brought me to where I am today: doing work that I find intellectually fulfilling, while hopefully helping countries improve their policies and, ultimately, people's lives.
I loved working with policymakers in Costa Rica. The consequences of the work felt very immediate and concrete. Then I received a scholarship to study abroad, thinking I would return after a year and continue on much the same path. Instead, that experience opened a much wider world of possibilities. I realised that I could take what I had been doing for my own country and contribute to similar work across many countries through international organisations.
Making that transition was not easy. As an immigrant, you often have to prove yourself more than once. I had to be prepared to start again, including taking an internship in my thirties and several short-term positions, while building a professional life in a new environment. My experience in Budapest was another important step. Working in a multinational company gave me a completely different perspective on how businesses operate and on the practical realities of implementing policy. It also gave me wonderful colleagues and experiences that I still carry with me today.
But the call towards public policy never really went away. So, I took another leap and joined the OECD at a time when my country was not even a member and when there was certainly no guarantee that I would be able to stay. It took several years to regain the stability I had before, but more than ten years later, I know it was the right decision.
And perhaps that is why, if I had to identify one achievement, it would not be a particular position, project or promotion. It would be having trusted my own sense of purpose enough to keep taking those leaps when the outcome was uncertain – and not giving up.
Today, I feel very fortunate to combine the things I care about most: law and policy, international co-operation, working with governments, and having an impact that goes beyond one institution or one country. I have built a career that I find meaningful, while also building a family and a life alongside it. For me, that is probably the achievement I value most.
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