Overseas Trade
Business, Innovation and Skills

Douglas Alexander (Paisley and Renfrewshire South, Labour)

To ask the Secretary of State for Business, Innovation and Skills which foreign-owned companies based in (a) Brazil, (b) Russia, (c) India and (d) China have made the largest contributions to the UK economy in the latest period for which figures are available.

Mark Prisk (Minister of State (Business and Enterprise), Business, Innovation and Skills; Hertford and Stortford, Conservative)

UK Trade and Investment (UKTI) is the Government department responsible for attracting foreign direct investment (FDI) to the UK, and enhancing the competitiveness of companies in the UK through overseas trade and investment. UKTI does not collect data which show the respective economic contribution to the UK economy of individual foreign-owned companies. UKTI does record the number of FDI projects entering the UK each year, together with the investing companies' estimates of associated jobs and (where made available) capital expenditure for the first three years of each FDI project. Companies are not required to provide capital expenditure data, and data gathered are therefore a partial data set.

Within the overall total for the UK, the figures for the latest period (financial year 2009-10) for Brazil, India and China are shown in the following table. There were no UKTI-recorded FDI projects from Russia that year.