Where the numbers come from

Flows are transactions during a year; positions (stocks) are holdings at year-end. The World Bank series on this site are balance-of-payments net flows: new investment minus disinvestment, including reinvested earnings and intra-company loans. Positions also change with prices and exchange rates, so they are not the sum of past flows. Bilateral and industry detail is generally only published for positions.

Headline balance-of-payments figures — including the World Bank series — follow the asset/liability principle. Breakdowns by partner and industry (OECD, ABS) follow the directional principle, which nets reverse investment (affiliates investing in their parents) out of the direction of the relationship. The two can differ materially, so totals from different tables will not always match.

A large share of recorded FDI passes through special purpose entities — holding and financing companies with few or no employees — in financial centres such as Luxembourg, the Netherlands, Ireland, the British Virgin Islands, Hong Kong and Singapore. These economies can record inflows and outflows far larger than their economies, and the same capital can be counted several times as it moves along an ownership chain.

IMF researchers (Damgaard, Elkjaer and Johannesen, 2019) estimated that almost 40% of global FDI positions were phantom investment into corporate shells. The OECD recommends that countries report resident SPEs separately; many do, but the World Bank flow series includes them. Treat very large numbers for financial centres — and global totals — with caution.

Standard bilateral statistics attribute investment to the immediate foreign owner. If a US company owns an Australian subsidiary through a Dutch holding company, the investment is recorded as Dutch. Some countries also publish inward positions by ultimate investing economy, which can change the picture substantially — and reveal round-tripping, where domestic money returns as “foreign” investment.

Profits kept by foreign affiliates are recorded as if paid to the parent and reinvested, so they count as FDI even though no money crosses a border. In some years they account for a large part of total FDI, and they turn negative when affiliates pay dividends greater than their profits — as happened on a large scale when US multinationals repatriated earnings after the 2017 US tax reform.

Because flows are net, a negative value means that disinvestment, loan repayments to parents or negative reinvested earnings exceeded new investment in that year. It does not necessarily mean foreign firms are leaving, and single large transactions can swing a small economy's figure from strongly positive to negative.

FDI statistics are revised, sometimes substantially, as surveys are completed and methods change. The most recent year is the least reliable and is often incomplete: this site treats the “latest year” for each indicator as the most recent year with broad country coverage, and marks any later partial year in the table above. Figures may differ from those in older publications.

FDI values are in current US dollars: not adjusted for inflation, and converted at each year's exchange rates. Long-run growth therefore partly reflects inflation, and a country's figures can move with its currency. Ratios to GDP avoid both problems and are the better basis for comparing economies and decades. ABS figures are in Australian dollars and are not directly comparable with US-dollar series.

Regional, income-group and world figures are the World Bank's own aggregates. In principle world inflows should equal world outflows; in practice they differ because of reporting gaps, timing, valuation and classification differences. Bilateral figures reported by one country rarely match the mirror figures of its partner.