Foreign direct investment and international trade in services: an analysis based on balance of payments microdata

This paper presents some analyses of FDI and international trade in services based on microdata used to produce balance of payments statistics. The microdata reveal and mitigate some informative limitations of official statistics, which no longer satisfy the growing need for internationalization data. The analysis shows that both FDI and trade in services are highly concentrated by size and geographic location; moreover, international trade in services also involves firms in the manufacturing industry, while FDI microdata indicate a significant presence of large companies and holdings. Indeed, the microdata show that internationalization often affects individual firms in different ways and is therefore suited to being studied from a number of perspectives; this opens up new possibilities for the empirical analysis of internationalization.