The Co-ordinated Portfolio Investment Survey – A model to follow?

In recent years, countries have experienced difficulty in adjusting their data collection systems to the growth in the scale and complexity of international financial transactions. For portfolio investment, this may have resulted in a significant underreporting of both transactions in and holdings of portfolio investment assets. Concern over this development led the IMF Committee on Balance of Payments Statistics (IMF Committee) to promote the idea of an internationally co-ordinated benchmark survey of cross-border portfolio investment asset holdings broken down by the country of residence of the issuer. This paper reviews experience in conducting the first Co-ordinated Portfolio Investment Survey (CPIS) for end-December 1997 (in which twenty-nine mostly industrial countries participated), and the second CPIS for end-December 2001 (in which sixty-seven countries participated, covering all groups except some oil-exporting countries). The paper notes that the CPIS has achieved many of the objectives envisaged by the IMF Committee, including (i) the development and implementation by national compilers of best practices in conducting benchmark surveys of portfolio investment asset positions; (ii) provision of partner country data sources to national compilers for portfolio investment liability positions; (iii) creation of a global database for portfolio investment asset and liability positions (the latter from creditor sources). The paper discusses further work that is planned to fill gaps in the coverage of the CPIS database, reviews the role of the IMF in facilitating the efforts of participating countries, and draws lessons from the CPIS that can be applied to other projects in which an international agency can play a facilitating and co-ordinating role in working directly with interested national compilers to improve national and global statistics.