WikiLeaks Document Release http://wikileaks.org/wiki/CRS-RS21118 February 2, 2009 Congressional Research Service Report RS21118 U.S. Direct Investment Abroad: Trends and Current Issues James K. Jackson, Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade Division August 15, 2008 Abstract. The United States is the largest investor abroad and the largest recipient of direct investment in the world. For some Americans, the national gains attributed to investing overseas are offset by such perceived losses as displaced U.S. workers and lower wages. Some observers believe U.S. firms invest abroad to avoid U.S. labor unions or high U.S. wages, however, 70% of U.S. foreign direct investment is concentrated in high income developed countries. Even more striking is the fact that the share of investment going to developing countries has fallen in recent years. Most economists conclude that direct investment abroad does not lead to fewer jobs or lower incomes overall for Americans and that the majority of jobs lost among U.S. manufacturing firms over the past decade reflect a broad restructuring of U.S. manufacturing industries. Order Code RS21118 Updated August 15, 2008 U.S. Direct Investment Abroad: Trends and Current Issues James K. Jackson Specialist in International Trade and Finance Foreign Affairs, Defense, and Trade Division Summary The United States is the largest investor abroad and the largest recipient of direct http://wikileaks.org/wiki/CRS-RS21118 investment in the world. For some Americans, the national gains attributed to investing overseas are offset by such perceived losses as displaced U.S. workers and lower wages. Some observers believe U.S. firms invest abroad to avoid U.S. labor unions or high U.S. wages, however, 70% of U.S. foreign direct investment is concentrated in high income developed countries. Even more striking is the fact that the share of investment going to developing countries has fallen in recent years. Most economists conclude that direct investment abroad does not lead to fewer jobs or lower incomes overall for Americans and that the majority of jobs lost among U.S. manufacturing firms over the past decade reflect a broad restructuring of U.S. manufacturing industries. This report will be updated as events warrant. Recent Investments New spending by U.S. firms on businesses and real estate abroad, or U.S. direct investment abroad,1 rose sharply in 2007 to $333 billion up from the $241 billion net they invested in 2006, according to the Department of Commerce.2 A drop in U.S. direct investment abroad that occurred in 2005 reflects actions by U.S. parent firms to reduce the amount of reinvested earnings going to their foreign affiliates for distribution to the U.S. parent firms in order to take advantage of one-time tax provisions in the American Jobs Creation Act of 2004 (P.L. 108-357). 1 The United States defines direct investment abroad as the ownership or control, directly or indirectly, by one person (individual, branch, partnership, association, government, etc.) of 10% or more of the voting securities of an incorporated business enterprise or an equivalent interest in an unincorporated business enterprise. 15 CFR § 806.15 (a)(1). 2 Bach, Christopher L., U.S. International Transactions in 2007. Survey of Current Business, April 2008, p. 48. Direct investment data reported in the balance of payments differ from capital flow data reported elsewhere, because the balance of payments data have not been adjusted for current cost adjustments to earnings. CRS-2 Generally, relative rates of growth between U.S. and foreign economies largely determine the direction and magnitude of direct investment flows. These flows also are affected by relative rates of inflation, interest rates, and expectations about the performance of national economies, which means they can be quite erratic at times. Since the mid-1990s, the combination of strong growth and low inflation in the U.S. economy attracted foreign investors, as indicated in Figure 1. From 2002 to 2007, U.S. direct investment abroad averaged more than twice the amount foreigners invested in the U.S. economy, reflecting the period of slower growth in the economy from 2001-2003. On the whole, U.S. firms are the most prolific overseas investors: a recent study by the United Nations indicates that U.S. firms are the largest foreign direct investors in the world and own as much abroad as the British and Germans combined, the next largest foreign direct investors. Figure 1. Foreign Direct Investment in the United States and U.S. Direct Investment Abroad, Annual Flows, 1990-2007 (in billions of dollars) Billions of dollars http://wikileaks.org/wiki/CRS-RS21118 $350 Foreign Direct Investment in $300 the United States $250 $200 $150 U.S. Direct Investment Abroad $100 $50 $0 1990 1992 1994 1996 1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 Year Source: U.S. Department of Commerce Table 1 indicates that the overseas direct investment position of U.S. firms on a historical-cost basis,3 or the cumulative amount at book value, reached $2.8 trillion in 2007, the latest year for such investment position data.4 More than 70% of these overseas 3 The position, or stock, is the net book value of U.S. parent company's equity in, and outstanding loans to, their affiliates abroad. A change in the position in a given year consists of three components: equity and intercompany inflows, reinvested earnings of incorporated affiliates, and valuation adjustments to account for changes in the value of financial assets. The Commerce Department also publishes data on the U.S. direct investment position valued on a current-cost and market value bases. These estimates indicate that U.S. direct investment abroad increased by $397 billion and $693 billion in 2007, respectively, to reach $3.3 and $5.1 trillion. 4 Ibarra, Marilyn, and Jennifer Koncz, Direct Investment Positions for 2007: Country and (continued...) CRS-3 investments are in developed countries: Europe alone accounts for over half of all U.S. direct investment abroad, or $1.6 trillion. Europe has been a prime target of U.S. investment since U.S. firms first invested abroad in the 1860s. American firms began investing heavily in Europe following World War II as European countries rebuilt their economies and later when they formed an intra-European economic union. Table 1. U.S. Direct Investment Position Abroad on a Historical-Cost Basis at Year-End 2007 (in millions of U.S. dollars) All Manu- Whole Inform- Banking Finance Services Holding Other industries facturing -sale ation com- trade panies All countries 2,791,269 531,315 183,038 111,866 91,768 531,933 63,791 927,578 202,661 Canada 257,058 93,516 18,241 4,819 3,130 45,296 4,389 21,798 33,169 Europe 1,551,165 257,397 109,995 73,170 70,728 255,598 37,949 593,837 115,110 Belgium 54,464 17,538 5,222 177 1,652 22,877 2,479 1,753 2,753 France 68,454 25,099 5,868 1,357 2,219 6,299 2,342 12,470 12,703 Germany 107,351 25,593 21,385 2,758 2,614 13,538 4,649 30,128 6,173 http://wikileaks.org/wiki/CRS-RS21118 Ireland 87,023 19,180 1,370 16,501 (D) 9,886 5,267 6,831 21,833 Italy 28,408 11,451 2,649 3,792 -42 3,561 1,020 3,076 2,866 Luxembourg 113,611 7,585 3,076 1,802 942 15,612 -24 83,595 861 Netherlands 370,160 27,404 17,619 6,694 17,414 37,077 3,023 254,500 3,078 Spain 55,894 13,196 3,582 589 1,771 7,145 2,132 24,880 2,530 Sweden 36,372 4,063 1,048 346 0 (D) 447 19,835 (D) Switzerland 127,709 11,273 22,166 1,267 13,460 12,229 1,631 59,720 5,803 Turkey 4,905 1,382 651 78 2,503 99 29 (*) 167 U. Kingdom 398,836 70,083 15,660 36,155 15,221 114,764 13,707 80,656 46,032 Latin Ameica 471,953 63,810 19,794 7,400 -6,701 139,345 2,445 196,942 21,599 Brazil 41,552 22,111 1,632 525 3,600 5,208 674 4,676 517 Chile 12,632 2,135 904 751 1,456 2,770 129 939 2,087 Venezuela 9,974 4,222 237 179 (D) 358 373 2,624 (D) Mexico 91,663 22,802 2,761 2,962 (D) 15,420 458 16,157 (D) Bermuda 148,633 982 2,561 518 (D) 76,741 200 62,770 4,627 U.K. Caribbean 90,803 1,783 (D) 579 -27,114 24,721 422 78,416 (D) Africa 27,764 3,187 1,087 286 1,541 1,885 327 6,249 615 Middle East 29,370 10,727 816 1,513 547 333 1,315 6,625 527 Asia 453,959 102,677 33,105 24,678 22,523 89,476 17,365 102,128 31,641 Australia 79,027 13,883 3,702 10,239 2,062 11,246 3,822 14,244 6,285 China 28,298 15,007 3,136 645 1,169 794 1,287 1,815 2,317 Hong Kong 47,431 3,680 7,475 1,197 2,270 9,514 3,832 17,648 1,815 Japan 101,607 19,273 8,552 4,554 648 45,874 1,654 11,494 9,553 Korea 27,151 10,930 1,638 721 6,954 4,221 1,265 140 1,282 Singapore 82,623 13,748 3,369 2,535 2,219 4,663 2,579 51,690 1,418 Taiwan 16,374 4,974 2,095 259 968 7,301 229 156 392 OPEC 43,778 8,979 1,251 258 1,631 1,118 772 12,578 1,813 Source: Ibarra, Marilyn, and Jennifer Koncz, Direct Investment Positions for 2007: Country and Industry Detail. Survey of Current Business, July 2008. p.33. Note: A (D) indicates that the data have been suppressed by the Department of Commerce to avoid disclosing the data of individual companies. 4 (...continued) Industry Detail, Survey of Current Business, July, 2008. p. 33. CRS-4 Typically, U.S. firms have placed the largest share of their annual investments in developed countries, primarily in Western Europe, but this tendency has increased since the mid-1990s. In the last half of the 1990s, U.S. direct investment abroad experienced a dramatic shift from developing countries to the richest developed economies: the share of U.S. direct investment going to developing countries fell from 37% in 1996 to 21% in 2000. In 2006, U.S. firms focused a slightly greater percent of their investment funds on developing countries, which received 28% of the investment funds of U.S. multinational firms. Patterns in U.S. direct investment abroad generally reflect fundamental changes that occur in the U.S. economy during the same period. As investment funds in the U.S. economy shifted from extractive, processing, and manufacturing industries toward high technology services and financial industries, U.S. investment abroad mirrored these changes. As a result, U.S. direct investment abroad focused less on the extractive, processing, and basic manufacturing industries in developing countries and more on high technology, finance, and services industries located in highly-developed countries with advanced infrastructure and communications systems. U.S. direct investment abroad during the 2000-2004 period increased about 56%. Investments in the finance and http://wikileaks.org/wiki/CRS-RS21118 services sectors grew twice as fast, on the whole, as direct investment abroad overall during the 1996-2000 period. Within the manufacturing sector, food processing, chemicals, and metals lagged in growth behind the industrial machinery, electronic, and transportation sectors. U.S. Multinationals Nations once hostile to American direct investment now compete aggressively by offering incentives to U.S. firms. A debate continues within the United States, however, over the relative merits of U.S. direct investment abroad. Some Americans believe that U.S. direct investment abroad, directly or indirectly, shifts some jobs to low wage countries. They argue that such shifts reduce employment in the United States and increase imports, thereby affecting negatively both U.S. employment and economic growth. Economists generally believe that firms invest abroad because those firms possess some special process or product knowledge or because they possess special managerial abilities which give them an advantage over other firms. On the whole, U.S. firms invest abroad to serve the foreign local market, rather than to produce goods to export to the United States, although some firms do establish overseas operations to replace U.S. exports or production, or to gain access to raw materials, cheap labor, or other markets. On average, about 8% of affiliate sales are to the U.S. parent companies.5 U.S. multinational corporations (MNCs) rank among the largest U.S. firms. According to data collected by the Commerce Department's Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA), when American parent companies and their foreign affiliates are compared by the size structure of employment classes, 40% of the more than 2,000 U.S. parent companies employ more than 2,499 persons. These large parent firms account for 95% of the total number of people employed by U.S. MNCs. Employment abroad is even 5 U.S. Direct Investment Abroad: Operations of U.S. Parent Companies and Their Foreign Affiliates, Preliminary 2004 Estimates, October 2006. Table III. F. 1. CRS-5 more concentrated among the largest foreign affiliates of U.S. parent firms: the largest 2% of the affiliates account for 90% of affiliate employment.6 While U.S. MNCs used their economic strengths to expand abroad between the 1980s and early 2000s, the U.S.-based parent firms lost market positions at home, in large part due to corporate downsizing efforts to improve profits. U.S. MNC parent companies' share of all U.S. business gross domestic product (GDP) -- the broadest measure of economic activity -- declined from 32% to 25% from 1977 to 1989, comprising 24% of total U.S. private business output in 1998 (the latest year for which estimates are available).7 These MNC parent companies increased their share of all U.S. business GDP in the services sector, which rose from 6% to 8% of U.S. GDP during the period from 1989 to 1998. The MNC share of all other industries rose from 16% to 18% during the 10-year period, but they lost shares in the manufacturing sector (from 62% to 58%) at a time when the U.S. manufacturing sector as a whole was shrinking as a share of national GDP (from 20% to 16%).8 As U.S. MNC parent companies were losing their relative market positions at home, their cumulative amount of direct investment abroad doubled. This increase did http://wikileaks.org/wiki/CRS-RS21118 spur a shift in some economic activity among the U.S. MNCs from the U.S. parent companies to the foreign affiliates. During the period from 1977 to 1997, the foreign affiliates increased their share of the total economic activity within U.S. MNCs -- the combined economic output of the U.S. parent and the foreign affiliates -- from 22% to 24%.9 Employment One of the most commonly expressed concerns about U.S. direct investment abroad is that U.S. parent companies invest abroad in order to send low-wage jobs overseas. Such effects are difficult to measure because they are small compared with much larger changes occurring within the U.S. economy. In addition, a cursory examination of the data seems to indicate that employment losses among parent firms occurred simultaneously with gains in foreign subsidiaries, thereby giving the impression that jobs are being shifted abroad. Employment among U.S. parent companies fell during the early 1980s, but increased in the 1992-2000 period, from 17.5 million to 23.9 million. From 2000 to 2003, however, employment among U.S. parent companies fell by 12% to 21.1 million, before rising after 2003 to reach 21.8 million in 2005 as U.S. economic growth picked up. Employment among foreign affiliates also rose in 2005 by 2.6% to 10.3 million, from 10.0 million in 2004. After employment losses in the early 1980s, employment at both the parent firms and the foreign affiliates increased after 1992, although at different rates and in different 6 Mataloni, Raymond J. Jr. U.S. Multinational Companies: Operations in 1998. Survey of Current Business, July 2000. pp. 24-45. 7 Mataloni, Raymond J. Jr. U.S. Multinational Companies: Operations in 2003. Survey of Current Business, July 2005. p. 15. 8 Ibid., p. 31. 9 Ibid., p. 31. CRS-6 industries. In a number of cases, U.S. parent firms and their foreign affiliates lost or gained employment in many of the same industries. Both the parent firms and the affiliates lost employment in the petroleum and finance sectors, although both gained employment in the services and wholesale trade sectors. Furthermore, employment gains and losses among MNCs more likely reflect fundamental shifts within the U.S. economy, than any formal or informal efforts to shift employment abroad. Some observers also contend that U.S. direct investment abroad supplants U.S. exports, thereby worsening the U.S. trade deficit and eliminating some U.S. jobs. Most analyses indicate, however, that intra-company trade, or trade between the U.S. parent company and its foreign subsidiaries, represents a large share of U.S. trade and that foreign investment typically boosts U.S. exports more than it contributes to a rise in imports or to a loss of exports. For instance, American multinational corporations account for over 60% of U.S. exports and 40% of U.S. imports, indicating that U.S. parent firms tend to be a more important source of supply to their affiliates than the affiliates are to their parent companies. http://wikileaks.org/wiki/CRS-RS21118 Conclusions American direct investment abroad has grown sharply since the mid-1990s, raising questions for many observers about the effects of such investment on the U.S. economy. These questions seem pertinent since American multinational corporations lost shares of U.S. GDP over the last decade and their domestic employment had declined until the mid- 1990s. Increased economic activity abroad relative to that in the United States increased overseas affiliate employment in some industries, including manufacturing. Most of this affiliate activity, however, is geared toward supplying the local markets in which they are located. In 2004, 9.5% of the sales of the foreign affiliates of U.S. firms was accounted for by exports back to the United States,10 although this share is nonetheless substantial. Some observers believe U.S. direct investment abroad is harmful to U.S. workers because it shifts jobs abroad. There is no conclusive evidence in the data collected to date to indicate that current investment trends are substantially different from those of previous periods or that jobs are moving offshore at a rate that is significantly different from previous periods.11 There are instances when firms shift activities abroad to take advantage of lower labor costs. However, it is clear from the data that the majority of U.S. direct investment abroad is in developed countries where wages, markets, industries, and consumers' tastes are similar to those in the United States. U.S. direct investment in these developed countries is oriented toward serving the markets where the affiliates are located and they tend, in the aggregate, to boost exports from the United States. In addition, foreign firms have been pouring record amounts of money into the United States to acquire existing U.S. firms, to expand existing subsidiaries, or to establish "greenfield" or new investments. 10 Mataloni, Operations of U.S. Multinational Companies. p. 41. 11 CRS Report RL32461, Outsourcing and Insourcing Jobs in the U.S. Economy: Evidence Based on Foreign Investment Data, by James K. Jackson.