The APF Canada Investment Monitor tracks foreign direct investment announcements at the firm level, taking a bottom-up approach rather than reviewing the balance of payments in Canada’s national accounts.
In order to generate the Investment Monitor data, APF Canada uses its own unique legacy data, third-party data sources, metasearch engines, and other search tools to aggregate data obtained from public sources including media reports, company documents, industry associations, and investment promotion agencies. Investment announcements that will be entered in the database include greenfield investments, asset purchases, equity investment, mergers, acquisitions, and joint ventures.
The Investment Monitor sources its investment stories primarily from its decades-long archive of announcements on deals, trade missions, MoUs and other developments of note in the Canada-Asia relationship. Such a vast archive allows the APF Canada Investment Monitor to build a strong foundation on which to track deal flow both historically and going forward. Each deal announcement is recorded, catalogued, and added to our database. Deals are recorded using 32 different observations ranging from parent company to destination city. Key to this cataloguing of investments for trend analysis is the use of a user-friendly sector classification system. Whereas deals catalogued with the widely used North American Industry Classification System often hide key trends in budding industries, the APF Canada Investment Monitor’s use of the modified Industrial Classification Benchmark (Modified ICB) allows it to clearly see growth in areas such as clean tech and the video gaming industry.
Dollar values for the Investment Monitor are obtained through a thorough investigation of the deal value and, barring an official value, the best publicly available estimate. This methodology allows for the avoidance of errors that occur in databases that estimate deal value using proprietary algorithms.