Tracking the international footprints of global firms

As the global economy becomes more integrated, there is a growing tension between the nature of economic activity and the measurement system that attempts to keep up with it. Many policies are still determined by measuring economic activity at the national level. Since the typical unit of analysis is the economic area (the "island"), economic activity is measured within the island and in terms of transactions between islands. But, increasingly, companies and their ownership are global, with economic activity taking place in a geographically dispersed way. We analyse several important issues created by this tension, show how they manifest themselves in the data and draw lessons from them.