Among the major initiatives of the IMF Committee on Balance of Payments Statistics is the 1997 Co-ordinated Portfolio Investment Survey, which is a co-ordinated survey of the stock of assets in the form of cross-border equities and bonds in reference to year-end 1997. The survey has the following two major objectives:
(a) to improve the statistics on cross-border holdings of securities, as well as provide a check on the coverage of portfolio investment financial flows and associated investment income data; and
(b) to exchange comparable data among participating countries (respecting confidentiality constraints) in order to improve countries' estimates of their external portfolio investment liabilities as well as associated financial flows and investment income data.
Of the 37 countries participating in the survey, 5 are in Asia: Indonesia, Japan, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand.
The Co-ordinated Portfolio Investment Survey is an ambitious undertaking, the success of which will contribute to significant improvements of statistics on investment flows and stocks. Less ambitious but nonetheless still extremely difficult was the development by the APEC Working Group on Trade and Investment Data (APEC TIDWG) of an "almost comparable" database on trade and investment (TIDDB) for the APEC economies. The TIDDB, which was initiated in 1990, is ready for access by member economies. The database currently contains adjusted merchandise trade data at 4-digit Harmonised System (HS) codes for trade among APEC countries. The adjusted data in the TIDDB are considered to be more comparable than the published trade data, and would facilitate future trade negotiations and bilateral reconciliation of trade data.
The APEC TIDWG plans to include comparable investment and trade in services statistics in the TIDDB. However, while the database has the technical capability to manage these additional statistics, the problem is that there are very few member economies that are currently able to provide these statistics. As noted above, Singapore is only one of four economies which have provided investment statistics in accordance with the IMF guidelines although all the other member economies are either in the process of improving their data sources or
