The number of people employed by majority-owned U.S. affiliates (MOUSAs) of foreign multinational enterprises dropped from 2019 to 2020, and COVID-19 may have been to blame.
A 2.8% decline from 8.08 million workers in 2019 meant MOUSAs only employed 7.86 million people in the United States in 2020, the Bureau of Economics Analysis (BEA) said in a recent news release. The lion's share of jobs related to MOUSAs was in manufacturing and retail.
While COVID-19 is the suspected culprit for the loss, the BEA said that it's difficult to tell for certain. That's because statistics cannot tell the full economic effects of the pandemic. These impacts are generally embedded in source data and cannot be separately identified.
That is not the only reduction associated with MOUSAs in the BEA analysis. The current dollar value added of MOUSAs, a measure of their direct contribution to U.S. gross domestic product, decreased 7% to $1.1 trillion in 2020. Additionally, MOUSAs accounted for 6.8% of total U.S. business-sector value added in 2020, down from 7% in 2019.
In more bad news for the United States, the amount MOUSAs spent for property, plant and equipment fell 4.7% to $281.8 billion in 2020. MOUSAs also accounted for 17.6% of total U.S. private business capital expenditures.
On the plus side, research and development performed by MOUSAs rose 3% to $71.4 billion, BEA data said.
The states with the highest private-industry employment relating to MOUSAs are South Carolina (9.4%), Hawaii (9.4%) and Michigan (9.1%). In South Carolina and Michigan, MOUSAs in the manufacturing sector employed the most workers; while "other industries," predominately accommodation and food services, employed the most MOUSA workers in Hawaii.