92002E0033

WRITTEN QUESTION E-0033/02

by Christopher Huhne (ELDR) to the Commission

(23 January 2002)

Subject: Intra-EU foreign direct investment

Will the Commission provide figures for the euro-area and for the non-euro-area Member States on a comparable basis to those given for the European Union for intra-EU foreign direct investment (in graph 12) of the report from the Commission Economic Reform: Report on the functioning of Community product and capital markets(1)?

(1) COM(2001) 736 final.

Answer given by Mr Bolkestein on behalf of the Commission

(18 March 2002)

Table 1 presenting data on the value in current prices of foreign direct flows from different sources to various targets (particularly the eurozone and non-eurozone) between 1996 and 2000 is sent direct to the Honourable Member and to the Parliament's Secretariat. The eurozone and the non-eurozone Member States are identified either as source or target in order to arrive at statistics comparable to those presented in graph 12 of the report from the Commission Economic Reform: Report on the functioning of Community product and capital markets(1).

The figures are arrived at by making the following assumptions:

1. the figures are Foreign direct investment (FDI) flows and exclude reinvested earnings (this is the standard approach Eurostat uses in its annual reports on foreign direct investment and in the Cardiff Report);

2. the rest of the world here means the world beyond the 15 Member States;

3. for consistency, almost all figures given are outflows recorded from the source investor. Only in the case of FDI flows from the rest of the world are inflows used as recorded by the target;

4. the eurozone here always includes Greece, even though it joined later.

Table 2, presenting the same data in index form, setting 1996 = 100, is also sent direct to the Honourable Member and to the Parliament's Secretariat.

(1) COM(2001) 736 final.