Industrial Policy & Trade Monitor· 2666 actions· ✨ 90 recent

On 27 August 2025 the Royal Government of Cambodia issued Sub-Decree No. 161, amending Annex II (List of Categorization of Investment Activities) of Sub-Decree No. 139 of 26 June 2023 — the principal implementing decree of the 2021 Law on Investment (Royal Kram NS/RKM/1021/014). The amendment reclassifies investment activities in the production of electricity generated from renewable energy from Group 2 (medium-technology investment activities) to Group 1 (priority-sector investment activities), the highest-tier category under Cambodia's CDC-administered Qualified Investment Project (QIP) route. Group 1 elevation entitles qualifying RE-generation projects to a nine-year corporate income tax holiday (the maximum under the Annex IV incentive matrix), full customs-duty exemption on imports of construction materials, production equipment, and production inputs, priority-sector premiums, accelerated CDC investment-licence processing, and Special Economic Zone overlays where applicable. The reclassification reflects Cambodia's Cambodia Power Development Master Plan 2022-2040, which targets 70% renewable energy in the national power mix by 2030. Sub-Decree 161 is the foundational KH-issuer post-2021 Investment Law implementing decree for the RE sector, providing the regulatory anchor for project bankability assessments under Cambodia's evolving competitive-auction (post-feed-in-tariff) pricing regime being structured by the Ministry of Mines and Energy and the Electricity Authority of Cambodia (EAC). It brings Cambodia into alignment with parallel ASEAN investment-incentive-amendment instruments in Vietnam, Laos, and Thailand.

NHPC Limited (a Government of India Navratna enterprise) tendered Lot-3 civil and hydro-mechanical works — main dam including coffer dam — for the 2,880 MW Dibang Multipurpose Project in Lower Dibang Valley district, Arunachal Pradesh, a strategic hydropower and flood- control project near the India-China border. Global Trade Alert records the tender's estimated value at INR 17,069 crore (~USD 2.05 billion), announced/implemented 15 July 2025. Per NHPC's standing compliance with the Government of India's Public Procurement (Preference to Make in India) Order, 2017, bidders must certify minimum local content, giving Class-I local suppliers a bid-evaluation preference margin across the tendered categories.

Norway's Ministry of Trade, Industry and Fisheries (Nærings- og fiskeridepartementet) submitted Meld. St. 16 (2024-2025) — "The Norwegian industry – competitiveness for a new time" — to the Storting on 28 March 2025 under Minister Cecilie Myrseth. The White Paper is Norway's first comprehensive industrial-policy framework in over a decade and sets out six political priorities: (i) access to clean and affordable energy via hydropower, offshore wind and green hydrogen; (ii) high-quality workforce with dual apprenticeship and digital-skills tracks; (iii) accelerating innovation and technology through R&D investment and stronger research-institute-to-business linkages; (iv) emission reduction across industrial sectors; (v) expanding international market access and reshaping Norway's position in the extended European value chain; and (vi) strategic and critical value-chain mapping, paralleled by a simultaneously launched cross-government mapping initiative. The White Paper is a non-binding policy framework but is the framing instrument under which sector-specific measures (CRMA-aligned mineral support, hydrogen funding, offshore-wind capacity build-out) will be sequenced.

Nepal's Federal Parliament ratified an omnibus statute on 20–31 March 2025 converting the 13 January 2025 Presidential Ordinance into permanent law, comprehensively amending 11 Acts including the Foreign Investment and Technology Transfer Act 2019 (FITTA), the Industrial Enterprises Act 2020, and the Special Economic Zone Act 2016. The statute expands the scope of permissible foreign investment (replacing the positive-list "any industry" with the broader "any industry other than those in the Schedule"), broadens the "technology transfer" definition to include management/technical services, IT, marketing, finance, engineering, and digital-data-processing, mandates prior Department of Industry approval for foreign investor equity transfers to domestic parties, and for the first time authorises Nepali companies to invest abroad using income earned from technology exports. Repatriation approval windows are compressed to 7 days (15 days for appeals), and foreign investment in Specialised Investment Fund (SIF) units is enabled via SEBON approval.

The National Assembly of the Lao PDR adopted the amended Law on Investment Promotion (No. 62/NA) on 28 June 2024; it entered into force on 16 December 2024, replacing the 2016 Investment Promotion Law and the 2019 Article-12 amendment. The statute spans 13 parts and 109 articles (62 amended, 32 new) and establishes the foundational legal architecture for domestic and foreign investment in Laos, setting out promotion categories, fiscal-incentive regimes, one-stop-service approval pathways, and investor-protection guarantees. Key reforms tighten the framework for large strategic-sector FDI in mining and hydropower — requiring partial state ownership — while expanding CIT/tax-holiday and customs-duty exemptions by SEZ category and sector-promotion zone. The law operationalises the Investment Promotion and Management Committee (IPMC) as the one-stop regulatory authority, enhancing alignment with the Lao-China Railway-driven Chinese-FDI surge and positioning Laos within the ASEAN horizontal investment-promotion reform wave.

On 4 June 2024 the Philippine Department of Energy issued Department Circular DC2024-06-0018, the Revised Omnibus Guidelines Governing the Award and Administration of Renewable Energy Contracts and the Registration of Renewable Energy Developers. The circular operationalises the November 2022 reinterpretation (DC2022-11-0034) under which solar, wind, biomass and ocean/tidal RE resources are excluded from the constitutional 60-40 nationality cap on natural-resource exploitation, allowing 100% foreign-owned applicants to take RE Service Contracts in those four resource classes. Geothermal RE contracts remain subject to the 60-40 Filipino-ownership requirement. The Guidelines also restructure pre-award, award and post-award procedures across the ~1,400 RE service contracts (≈154 GW) in the DOE pipeline and allow developers to begin permitting and feasibility work before the 25-year contract term formally begins.