Sector Specific Foreign Direct Investment: A Database

Despite the growing importance of foreign direct investment (FDI) to the global economy, there remains a paucity of data that impedes the much needed research on FDI. There is a great need for this data, particularly as researchers and policy makers increase their focus on services. This paper provides a new database of bilateral FDI stocks and flows data for 57 sectors and 113 countries. Prior attempts have been made to construct a similar database, and this paper seeks to augment these results in several ways. Several country-specific and region specific datasets including the data from the U.S. BEA, ASEAN and the European Commission are brought to bear. Missing values are computed via coefficients obtained from the estimation of sector specific gravity based equations. Particular attention is paid to differences between developed and emerging countries that have not until now been treated in great detail; these will become increasingly important as those countries attract more FDI. Finally, an attempt is made to distinguish between drivers of services FDI and drivers of manufacturing FDI.