“Made in China” may no longer be the go-to moniker as news surfaced earlier in the week that the United States recently overtook the land-of-the-rising-sun as the investment destination of choice, this according to global chief executives polled in a recent survey.

The accounting and consulting firm Pricewaterhouse Cooper (PwC) started tracking investment criteria among executives roughly five years ago and this is the first time the United States has topped the PwC list. The PwC’s survey was based on nearly 1,500 interviews spread out across 77 countries and conducted during the first half of 2014.

According to an Associated Press news article, the standings for the U.S. appear to be welcome news for investors globally, who are skittish about the current slow economic growth in China, which has a long term outlook that focuses on under-performing. The U.S. economy, despite what naysayer economists feel, leads the pack globally as the most important market for growth in the new year. This counter-balances the feeling among some CEOs who maintain that the global economy will not be nearly as austere as a year ago.

For its part, Pricewaterhouse Cooper discovered that the outlook is moot among CEO investors: nearly 40 percent of executives polled think the global outlook will get better over the next 12 months (that is down from 44 percent last year) while just over 15 percent think the global outlook will become more robust (which is more than twice last year’s figure).

Spokespersons for the World Economic Forum feel that there is a real movement to economies that offer some real degree of stability from a business investment point of view, and that’s interesting trend from what we’ve seen in the past.

A combination of global factors at at fault: geopolitical tensions, massive fluctuation among international currencies and a dramatic fall in oil prices seem to fuel the consensus for economic gloom in the long-term. Which may explain, according to the Associated Press, why many CEOs are less confident about global growth than they were just a year ago.

To underscore this point, the International Monetary Fund, in a move earlier in the week, downgraded its global growth forecasts for this year and next by 3.5 percent and 3.7 percent respectively, fueled no doubt by China’s reported economic growth slowing to 7.4 percent in 2014. That is reported to be the country’s lowest in more than 15 years.

That said, the economic drop cited by PwC may be the exception and not the rule. The outlook for CEO’s in the Middle East and Asia is much more positive compared to that of Central and Eastern Europe. Of the many Eurozone participants shuddering in the wake of the current economic flux, Russia in particular may be feeling the effects the most, thanks to its actions in the Ukraine, coupled with sanctions enacted by the United Nations and its allies. Not only that, Russia has also suffered from the sharp fall in the price of oil. Not only is the Russian economy largely dependent on oil revenues but its national currency (the ruble) has nose-dived in recent times.