CHIIA Prospectus

The Prospectus was published for the CHIIA launch on 8 October, 2018 at PwC Sydney. It explains why we need new data on Chinese investment in Australia and provides an overview of how the data has been painstakingly constructed.

The story of Chinese direct investment in Australia (2014 – 2017)

CHIIA has produced four years of data, covering the calendar years 2014 to 2017 with data for 2018 under construction. A series of key statistics calculated from CHIIA data are presented here.
These statistics provide an overview of CHIIA data at present and consider specific aspects of Chinese investment in Australia that have not been covered by other sources.
Many of these statistics present information that had previously not been assembled into an analytical framework. Some CHIIA data may look similar to those published previously.
The crucial difference between those statistics and those in this prospectus is that CHIIA data are verifiable. That is, the data are publicly available at the transaction level. This means you can reproduce the statistics you see here and create many more.

The CHIIA Data in Comparative Perspective

This paper explains the information gap filled by the Chinese Investment in Australia Database (CHIIA). While there are other sources of data on the realisation of Chinese direct investment in Australia, no other source publishes transaction-level data that is classified by ultimate beneficial control and date of realisation. To better understand how CHIIA relates to data on other aspects of Chinese investment in Australia including foreign investment approvals data, the concept of an ‘investment pipeline’ is developed.

This pipeline helps explain why different data sources report very different annual figures. This paper addresses the question ‘What does CHIIA data tell us about Chinese investment in Australia, that we didn’t know before?’.