Activities of Canadian majority-owned affiliates abroad, expanded measures – Provisional estimates for reference year 2012 - ARCHIVED

With Canadian companies increasingly engaged in the global economy there is a growing demand for more detailed information on their international activities to better understand how Canadian businesses are expanding internationally and what the benefits/consequences are for Canada.

Outward Foreign Affiliate Statistics (FAS), which describe the activities as well as financial positions of Canadian majority-owned foreign affiliates (MOFAS), can shed light on some of these issues by going beyond the traditional realm of cross-border foreign investment statistics to articulate the activities and financial positions of Canadian enterprises that operate abroad. As an extension of statistics on foreign direct investment they can be seen as providing additional insight of the effect on economic agents in national economies in terms of earnings, productivity, employment, trade and foreign exposures resulting from an increasingly inter-connected and integrated global economy.

This paper presents some data development work on the expansion of the outward FAS program at Statistics Canada, the considerations and strategy for improvement, and provides a first look at the expanded details in the form of provisional estimates for reference year 2012.