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IPS129 Claudia V. et al.
treat resident SPEs separately. As such, businesses with low turnover can be
grouped in smaller stratums unless previously identified through random
sampling. Table 2 presents the sampling proportions for enterprise groups
classified as resident SPEs and non-SPEs in this analysis. As can be seen, a
smaller proportion of SPEs are sampled compared to non-SPEs – possibly due
to fewer sitting in sampling stratums reserved for larger businesses according
to turnover. Furthermore, while fewer are sampled, those that are account for
a larger proportion of the overall value estimated for groups classified as SPEs.

Table 2: Sampling and estimation of resident SPEs and non-SPEs
SPE NON-SPE
Percentage of groups 16% 19%
sampled
Percentage of inward 95% 90%
positions sampled

Finally, a key area for future research is to classify all entities within the FDI
population. As noted in the paper, not all entities in the FDI population were
classified as it was not possible to link them all to the IDBR. A future review of
the data sources used for these estimates may help improve the results.

5. Conclusions
Accurate coverage and separation of SPEs has become ever more
important for ensuring FDI statistics are accurate and remain useful to users –
who increasingly need to separate SPEs from headline statistics to understand
the true beneficiaries and risk takers of FDI.
While international manuals and organisations have emphasised the
importance of measuring SPEs in FDI statistics, there has been an outstanding
requirement for an internationally agreed definition. As such, the TFSPE
proposed definition, decision tree and typology are a welcome development
that provides a clear framework for classifying SPEs.
Results presented in this paper have been produced through utilising
definitions produced by the TFSPE and available data sources. The
experimental results estimate that £74 billion of the UK’s inward FDI positions
were attributable to enterprise groups classified as SPEs, or 8.4% of the
positions analysed. The results also suggested these groups’ economic activity
and their immediate parents are distinct from groups not classified as SPEs.
While these results are a positive step towards being able to separate
resident SPEs from UK FDI statistics, the paper also highlighted a range of
areas for future development to help improve these results. These largely
focus on increasing the availability of data regarding multinationals

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