Foreign Direct Investment

Foreign Direct Investment (FDI) statistics are commonly treated as unproblematic measures of the ‘true’ levels of cross-border investment flows. Through a dissection of the manifold measurement problems underlying standard FDI statistics, this chapter offers a different perspective on these numbers. The analysis raises serious questions about the ability of FDI statistics to provide information that is meaningful for policymakers or scholarly analyses of FDI. By doing so, the chapter encourages IPE scholars to conceptualise statistics as socially constructed mind maps and to study the role of statisticians as important meaning makers in international affairs.