That prompted the European Union and Australia to suspend their own sanctions, raising the prospect of a foreign investment boom that American corporations are eager not to miss.
Once made rich from the tourism trade, Blackpool has been in steady decline ever since the foreign holiday boom of the 1960s, and the economic downturn has exacerbated its plight.
The last foreign investment boom began after the dollar plunged against the yen and Europe's currencies in 1985-86; this made American investments look cheap, especially to Japanese companies whose stocks sold at the time at multiples worthy of a millennial dot-com.
Sierra Leone's foreign investment boom, mainly in iron ore and diamond mines but also in roads and new homes, has created small islands of prosperity and the possibility of increased tax revenues for the state.
With China's newly rich middle class traveling for pleasure and a foreign tourism boom expected from the 2008 Beijing Olympics, who will visit the sights if Starbucks and shopping malls surround the monasteries and mausoleums?
There has been some windfall from the foreign-property boom.
Chongqing's departure from government policy can be exaggerated – its private sector has expanded even faster than the public sector and foreign investment boomed.
Foreign investment boomed as new regulations and tax laws were introduced, business laws were formulated and capital market reforms were put in place.
For example, the foreign-stock boom of the late 1980s gave way, after a brief bear market in 1990, to big gains in financial stocks in the early '90s and then to the surge in technology stocks in the middle to late part of the decade.
It has also spurred a foreign-investment boom, and an increase in the number of American tourists visiting the island in the two years since diplomatic relations were restored; last year, more than six hundred thousand Cuban-Americans and other U.S. travellers went to Cuba, an increase of a third since 2015.
