Direct investment positions: who owns what, and where it came from

Definitions and method

The IMF publishes mirror statistics here: a reporter-counterpart pair can appear twice, once as the reporter stated it and once derived from what the counterpart stated. In a single year 3,113 pairs carry both. Only the reporter's own figure is stored. The mirror is not averaged in, because a country's statement of its own position is a different claim from its partner's and combining them produces neither — and where the two disagree, that disagreement is itself the finding. Note also that a net position can be negative, which is not an error: it means the reported liabilities are smaller than the assets on the same relationship.