Problems of accounting for foreign direct investment in international and Russian statistics

Abstract

The paper discusses the approaches to statistical accounting of foreign direct investment (FDI) present in Russian and international practice, as well as alternative approaches to accounting of FDI using microdata. International practice shows that often the official statistics provided by national central banks according to the methodology of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, and alternative estimates of FDI at the enterprise level differ significantly. The purpose of this article is to identify the main problems of traditional methods of accounting FDI and assess the applicability of the microdata approach to address these problems. To this end, the paper analyzes the recommendations of the OECD and the IMF on accounting FDI in statistics, as well as the methodology of the Central Bank of the Russian Federation (CBR). According to the author, the methodologies of international organizations do not solve a number of problems in relation to the Russian ones. Thus, the present methodologies do not address the issue of offshore FDI, as well as the actual geographical distribution of FDI in the regions of the Russian Federation. The article demonstrates that a number of problems associated with traditional FDI statistics can be addressed with enterprise microdata. The article proves why traditional statistics can give a distorted picture due to unresolved issues of these and other issues, and shows how microdata can help in solving this problem. In particular, micro-level data helps to understand the structure of FDI at the regional level, as well as the role of offshore companies in the structure of inbound and outbound FDI.