Chinese direct investment in the EU and the US: a comparative view

Chinese outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) in developed economies has increased substantially in recent years, driven by policy liberalization and structural adjustments in China’s economy. Efforts to accurately describe the dimensions of this increase are complicated by problems with official statistics and the complexity of deal structures. This article introduces the major problems of capturing data on global cross-border investment flows and elaborates on the particular difficulties of measuring Chinese outward FDI. It identifies alternative datasets that can help to better capture the scope and patterns of the Chinese overseas investment and uses one of them to describe the growth of Chinese investment in the EU and the US since 2000, highlighting similarities and differences in investment patterns in the world’s two biggest economies.