Foreign direct investment flowing both ways between the US and China may be two to four times greater than shown by data from both governments.

That’s according to a Rhodium Group analysis of deals from 1990 to 2015 released in a joint report with the National Committee on US-China Relations.

Nearly 6,700 US investments in China over that quarter century have a combined value of $228bn, Rhodium found, far beyond the $75bn US Department of Commerce estimate or the $70bn from China’s Ministry of Commerce. China’s 1,200 transactions over those years come to a combined value of $64bn, eclipsing Mofcom’s $41bn tally and the $15bn to $21bn range from the Commerce Department.

For the first time, Chinese companies invested more in the US last year than American companies in China, underscoring the evolution of the world’s two largest economies.

Economic integration “is much greater than official statistics suggest,” said Thilo Hanemann, an economist at Rhodium. “That means that the costs on both sides from protectionist frictions are much higher than commonly assumed.”

American companies employ more than 1.6m workers in China, while that country’s investment presence provides more than 100,000 jobs in the US, and the benefits are spread across more than 90pc of US states and Chinese provinces, according to Rhodium.

“The local benefits have been enormous,” the New York-based organisations wrote in their joint report. “These links also facilitate people-to-people relationships to a greater extent than trade and tourism.”

More than 1,300 American companies have major operations in China, with 430 of those investing over $50m and 56 more than $1bn, Rhodium concluded.

“Upgrading US-China FDI policy is not just a noble long-term goal but a present necessity”, the organisations concluded.

Published in Dawn, Business & Finance weekly, November 21st, 2016