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EMBARGOED UNTIL RELEASE AT 8:30 A.M. EDT, Friday, August 24, 2018

BEA 18-41

Activities of U.S. Multinational Enterprises: 2016

Worldwide employment by U.S. multinational enterprises (MNEs) increased 0.4 percent to 42.3 million workers (preliminary) in 2016 from 42.1 million (revised) in 2015, according to statistics released by the Bureau of Economic Analysis on the operations and finances of U.S. parent companies and their foreign affiliates.

Employment in the United States by U.S. parents was nearly unchanged at 28.0 million workers in 2016. U.S. parents accounted for 66.3 percent of worldwide employment by U.S. MNEs, a decrease of 0.3 percentage points from 2015. Employment abroad by majority-owned foreign affiliates (MOFAs) of U.S. MNEs increased 1.2 percent to 14.3 million workers and accounted for 33.7 percent of employment by U.S. MNEs worldwide.

U.S. parents accounted for 22.3 percent of total private industry employment in the United States. Employment by U.S. parents was largest in manufacturing and retail trade. Employment abroad by MOFAs was largest in China, the United Kingdom, Mexico, India, and Canada.

Worldwide current-dollar value added of U.S. MNEs decreased 1.5 percent to $5.2 trillion. Value added by U.S. parents, a measure of their direct contribution to U.S. gross domestic product, was nearly unchanged at $3.9 trillion, representing 24.2 percent of total U.S. private industry value added. MOFA value added decreased to $1.3 trillion. Value added by MOFAs was largest in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Ireland.

Worldwide expenditures for property, plant, and equipment of U.S. MNEs decreased 7.6 percent to $856.9 billion. Expenditures by U.S. parents accounted for $657.5 billion and MOFA expenditures for $199.5 billion.

Worldwide research and development expenditures of U.S. MNEs increased 4.9 percent to $350.3 billion. U.S. parents accounted for expenditures of $296.9 billion and MOFAs for $53.5 billion.

Additional statistics on the activities of U.S. parent companies and their foreign affiliates including sales, balance sheet and income statement items, compensation of employees, trade in goods, and more are available on BEA’s website. More industry detail for U.S. parents and more industry and country detail for foreign affiliates are also available on the website and will be published in the September issue of the Survey of Current Business.

Updates to the statistics

Statistics for 2015 are revised to incorporate newly available and revised source data. Preliminary statistics for 2015 were released in November 2017 and highlighted in “Activities of U.S. Multinational Enterprises in 2015” in the December 2017 issue of the Survey of Current Business.

Updates to Statistics on 2015 Activities of U.S. Multinational Enterprises Billions of dollars, except as noted
	U.S. Parents		MOFAs
	Preliminary estimate	Revised estimate	Preliminary estimate	Revised estimate
Number of employees (thousands)	28,302.2	28,045.6	14,124.1	14,081.0
Value added	3,961.3	3,949.2	1,357.5	1,358.8
Expenditures for property, plant, and equipment	700.5	712.6	229.4	214.8
Research and development expenditures	284.3	277.8	54.8	56.1

Next release: August 2019
Activities of U.S. Multinational Enterprises: 2017

Full Release & Tables (PDF)

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Technical

Mark Goddard

301-278-9162

mark.goddard@bea.gov

Technical

Ryan Noonan

(301) 278-9131

Ryan.Noonan@bea.gov

News Media

Jeannine Aversa

(301) 278-9003

Jeannine.Aversa@bea.gov

Resources

Stay informed about BEA developments by reading the BEA blog, signing up for BEA's email subscription service, or following BEA on Twitter @BEA_News.
Historical time series for these estimates can be accessed in BEA's Interactive Data Application.
Access BEA data by registering for BEA's Data Application Programming Interface (API).
BEA's news release schedule.
More information on these statistics on the activities of U.S. MNEs will be provided in the September issue of the Survey of Current Business.
More statistics on the activities of U.S. MNEs, including more detail by industry and country, are available on the BEA website.
More information on the statistics on activities of U.S. MNEs is provided in U.S. International Economic Accounts: Concepts and Methods.
BEA also publishes a companion series on the activities of U.S. affiliates of foreign MNEs. Data for 2016 will be released November 8, 2018.

Definitions

A U.S. multinational enterprise (U.S. MNE) comprises the U.S. parent and its foreign affiliates.

A U.S. parent is a person (in the broad legal sense to include any individual, partnership, corporation, or other form of organization), resident in the United States, that owns 10 percent or more of a foreign business enterprise, referred to as its foreign affiliate.

A majority-owned foreign affiliate (MOFA) is a foreign business enterprise in which the combined ownership of all U.S. parents, either directly or indirectly, exceeds 50 percent.

Employment covers the total number of full-time and part-time employees on the payroll at the end of the year.

Value added is the value of the final goods and services produced by a firm’s labor and property. Value added represents the firm’s contribution to the gross domestic product of the firm’s country of residence. The estimates of value added in this release were prepared by summing cost and profit data collected in BEA’s surveys of U.S. direct investment abroad and are conceptually consistent with BEA’s estimates of U.S. value added by industry.

Expenditures for property, plant, and equipment cover total expenditures for land and depreciable structures and equipment; they are gross of any sales, retirements, or transfers of previously owned tangible assets.

Research and development (R&D) expenditures include expenditures for R&D performed by the U.S. parent or the affiliate, whether the R&D was for their own use or for use by others and irrespective of the source of funding.

Statistical conventions

The statistics on the activities of U.S. MNEs are based primarily on data reported in the Annual Survey of U.S. Direct Investment Abroad (BE-11) conducted by BEA. The statistics provide information on the operations and finances of U.S. parent companies and their foreign affiliates. The statistics on foreign affiliates cover the entire operations of the affiliate, irrespective of the percentage of U.S. ownership.

To compute the U.S. parent share of U.S. private industry employment, BEA used comparable statistics at the aggregate level for all U.S. private industries from BEA’s national income and product accounts (NIPAs) in line 3 (private industries) of Table 6.4D Full-Time and Part-Time Employees by Industry.

To compute the U.S. parent share of U.S. private industry value added, BEA used comparable statistics at the aggregate level for all U.S. private industries from BEA’s gross domestic product by industry accounts in line 2 (private industries) of the Value Added by Industry table.

Supplemental information

The U.S. parent share of U.S. MNE worldwide activity can change for a number of reasons. The changes do not uniformly correspond to either additions to, or subtractions from, employment and capital expenditures in the United States. Examples of factors—other than production shifting—that can change parent and affiliate shares of MNE activity include different rates of economic growth in the United States. Specifically, economic growth can occur in markets where investment takes place abroad or where the creation of new market opportunities abroad cannot be served by exports from the United States.

List of News Release Tables

Table 1. Selected Data for U.S. Parents by Industry of U.S. Parent, 2016
Table 2. Selected Data for Majority-Owned Foreign Affiliates by Industry of Affiliate, 2016
Table 3. Selected Data for Majority-Owned Foreign Affiliates by Country, 2016
Table 4. Employment of Majority-Owned Foreign Affiliates, Country by Industry of Affiliate, 2016