OECD's efforts to measure the activities of multinational enterprises

Abstract

The OECD, through the Statistical Working Party of the Committee on Business and Industry Environment, has been meeting in a special session to develop indicators of economic globalisation for a decade. Early work of this group focused on empirical analysis which quickly reached the limits of existing data, re-orienting the work towards data development that focused on the activities of multinational enterprises (AFA/FATS), complimenting already existing work on FDI Flows that adhere to a balance of payments approach. Difficulties in achieving international comparability in these data have led to a multi-year effort to develop methodological guidelines for a core set of reference indicators that depict economic globalisation. This manual is now reaching fruition. Rather than focus on one narrow aspect of economic globalisation (e.g. trade), this work seeks to integrate four different driving forces of economic globalisation – FDI, MNE activities, technology diffusion and trade – taking advantage of already existing international methodologies as well as developing work in the area of AFA/FATS. The near-term future work is focused on compiling these reference indicators that adhere to these guidelines, resolving some of the outstanding international comparability problems in this area; using the data in empirical analysis to test the robustness of the indicators in exploring policy issues and extending the work to cover additional areas such as financial portfolio investments. The longer-term work is to fill in some of the missing pieces as regards MNEs: their investments abroad and the overall activity of the parent. This may require the development of new surveys that entail a high degree of international co-operation.