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.
• BEA's news release schedule
• More information on these statistics on the activities of U.S. MNEs will be provided in the December 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 2019 was released August 20, 2021.
• Detailed microdata from the surveys are available to researchers in BEA’s Special Sworn Researcher program under arrangements that maintain legal confidentiality requirements.

Definitions

A U.S. multinational enterprise (U.S. MNE) is composed of 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 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 GDP by Industry Accounts in line 2 (“Private industries”) of the table “Value Added by Industry.”

Related Statistics

Statistics on the activities of U.S. MNEs are one part of a broader set of U.S. international economic accounts that, taken together, provide a comprehensive, integrated and detailed picture of U.S. international economic activities

Statistics on direct investment and multinational enterprises include annual statistics on the activities of U.S. affiliates of foreign MNEs, detailed annual and quarterly statistics on direct investment, and annual statistics on new foreign investment in the United States.

Statistics on international services, released annually, include detailed annual information on trade in services and on services supplied through the channel of direct investment by affiliates of MNEs.

The International Investment Position (IIP) Accounts are released quarterly. The IIP is a statistical balance sheet that presents the dollar value of U.S. financial assets and liabilities with respect to foreign residents at a specific point in time.

The International Transactions Accounts (ITAs) are released quarterly. The ITAs are a statistical summary of economic activity between U.S. residents and the residents of other countries.

U.S. international trade in goods and services, released by BEA and the U.S. Census Bureau, provides monthly statistics on trade in goods and services.

List of News Release Tables

Table 1. Selected Data for U.S. Parents by Industry of U.S. Parent, 2019
Table 2. Selected Data for Majority-Owned Foreign Affiliates by Industry of Affiliate, 2019
Table 3. Selected Data for Majority-Owned Foreign Affiliates by Country, 2019
Table 4. Employment of Majority-Owned Foreign Affiliates, Country by Industry of Affiliate, 2019