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EMBARGOED UNTIL RELEASE AT 8:30 A.M. EST, Friday, November 17, 2023

BEA 23–53

Activities of U.S. Multinational Enterprises, 2021

Worldwide employment by U.S. multinational enterprises (MNEs) increased 1.1 percent to 43.3 million workers in 2021 (preliminary) from 42.9 million workers in 2020 (revised), according to statistics released today by the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis (BEA) on the operations and finances of U.S. parent companies and their foreign affiliates.

Employment in the United States by U.S. parents increased 2.2 percent to 29.5 million workers in 2021 (table 1). U.S. parents accounted for 68.1 percent of worldwide employment by U.S. MNEs, up from 67.4 percent in 2020 (chart 1). Employment abroad by majority-owned foreign affiliates of U.S. MNEs decreased 1.2 percent to 13.8 million workers and accounted for 31.9 percent of employment by U.S. MNEs worldwide.

Employment by U.S. Multinational Enterprises, 2021

U.S. parents accounted for 23.1 percent of total private industry employment in the United States in 2021, down from 23.5 percent in 2020, as total private industry employment rose more than U.S. parent employment. Employment by U.S. parents was largest in manufacturing and in retail trade. Employment abroad by majority-owned foreign affiliates was largest in India, Mexico, and the United Kingdom (table 4).

Worldwide current-dollar value added of U.S. MNEs increased 25.4 percent to $6.6 trillion. Value added by U.S. parents, a measure of their direct contribution to U.S. gross domestic product, increased 27.7 percent to $5.1 trillion (table 1). U.S parents accounted for 24.4 percent of total U.S. private-industry value added, up from 21.3 percent in 2020. Majority-owned foreign affiliate value added increased 18.6 percent to $1.6 trillion (chart 2). Value added by majority-owned foreign affiliates was largest in the United Kingdom, Canada, and Ireland (table 3).

Worldwide expenditures for property, plant, and equipment of U.S. MNEs increased 7.2 percent to $917.4 billion. Expenditures by U.S. parents accounted for $728.8 billion (table 1), and expenditures by majority-owned foreign affiliates accounted for $188.6 billion (chart 2).

Worldwide research and development expenditures of U.S. MNEs increased 10.7 percent to $472.6 billion. U.S. parents accounted for expenditures of $402.7 billion, and majority-owned foreign affiliates accounted for $69.9 billion (chart 2).

Activities of U.S. Multinational Enterprises, 2021

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.

Updates to the statistics

Statistics for 2020 were revised to incorporate newly available and revised source data. Preliminary statistics for 2020 were released in November 2022 and highlighted in “Activities of U.S. Multinational Enterprises in 2020” in the December 2022 Survey of Current Business.

**Table A. Updates to Statistics on 2020 Activities of U.S. Multinational Enterprises** [Billions of dollars, except as noted]
	U.S. Parents		Majority-owned foreign affiliates
	Preliminary estimate	Revised estimate	Preliminary estimate	Revised estimate
Number of employees (thousands)	28,440.4	28,893.3	14,007.6	13,976.0
Value added	3,813.2	3,966.3	1,325.9	1,329.8
Expenditures for property, plant, and equipment	651.9	676.3	181.2	179.6
Research and development expenditures	361.2	367.6	59.1	59.3
U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis

Next release: August 23, 2024
Activities of U.S. Multinational Enterprises, 2022

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Technical

Mark Goddard

301-278-9162

mark.goddard@bea.gov

Media

Thomas Dail

301-278-9003

Thomas.Dail@bea.gov

Resources

Stay informed about BEA developments by reading The BEA Wire, signing up for BEA's email subscription service, or following @BEA_News on X, formerly known as Twitter.
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.
More information on the activities of U.S. multinational enterprises (MNEs) will be published in December in BEA’s online journal, the Survey of Current Business.
For upcoming economic indicators, see BEA’s news release schedule
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 2021 were released August 18, 2023.
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 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 (GDP) 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 BEAs estimates of U.S. value added by industry.

Expenditures for property, plant, and equipment covers 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 includes 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 BEAs 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.