Following international guidelines, BEA statistics on bilateral U.S. direct investment abroad (USDIA) are compiled and presented by immediate partner economy. Though well suited for many purposes, this approach can lead to difficulty in interpreting direct investment statistics, especially in identifying the economies that are the ultimate destinations, or hosts, of direct investment.

BEA is engaged in ongoing research to develop USDIA statistics by ultimate host economy (UHE). This research has focused on producing statistics on equity position by UHE using a variety of methods to reallocate the equity position from the immediate host economy.

An October 2023 working paper details BEA's initial efforts to develop USDIA statistics by UHE and presents UHE equity positions by industry sector and for selected countries using 2019 data. A working paper released in September 2025 enhances the methodologies used to reallocate positions and, using these improvements, presents UHE equity positions by industry sector and for an expanded set of countries for 2019 and 2020.

To accompany the updated working paper, BEA released an experimental dataset that provides the total value of the equity positions reallocated between individual pairs of countries for 2019 and 2020. For any pair of countries, A and B, this dataset provides, for selected reallocation methods, the total value of the immediate equity position in A that has been reallocated to B as a UHE equity position.