China FDI Flow & Position Monitor

Track China's official OECD foreign-direct-investment financial flows and positions without maintaining an SDMX integration. The Actor returns quarterly flows and annual positions for assets and liabilities, detects delivery-to-delivery revisions, and is ready for scheduled monitoring.

What it monitors

• FDI financial flows — quarterly OECD DF_FDI_FLOW_AGGR total financial-account values.
• FDI financial positions — annual OECD DF_FDI_POS_AGGR total financial-account values.
• China (CHN), USD values, world counterpart, total economy, assets and liabilities.
• Only public OECD rows marked CONF_STATUS=F.

The accounting labels matter: assets and liabilities are not renamed to “outbound” and “inbound.” A flow is activity during a period; a position is a stock at a point in time.

Example input

{
  "datasets": ["flow", "position"],
  "startYear": 2021,
  "endYear": 2025,
  "watchName": "china-fdi-main",
  "cacheMaxAgeMinutes": 60
}

The inclusive window is limited to 10 years. Selecting both datasets makes one bounded official request for each. The Actor never uses an Apify proxy, a third-party proxy, or a VPN.

Output

One Dataset row represents one selected OECD dataflow. observations contains assets/liabilities periods, the original numeric value, OECD unitMultiplier, and a convenient valueUsd. Negative source values remain negative.

{
  "dataset": {"kind": "flow", "title": "FDI financial flows"},
  "terminology": "assets_liabilities",
  "changeType": "revision",
  "observations": [
    {
      "accountingEntry": "L",
      "side": "liabilities",
      "period": "2024-Q2",
      "value": -8990,
      "unitMultiplier": 6,
      "valueUsd": -8990000000,
      "currency": "USD",
      "confidentialityStatus": "F"
    }
  ],
  "adaptation": {"marker": "ACTOR_DERIVED_DELTA", "isAdapted": true},
  "source": {"provider": "OECD", "apiUrl": "https://sdmx.oecd.org/..."}
}

changeType, new/revised/removed observations and changed keys are computed by this Actor from successive confirmed paid deliveries. They are not fields supplied by OECD, and every row carries an explicit adaptation marker.

Scheduling

1. Save the example as an Apify Task.
2. Keep watchName, datasets and year window stable.
3. Schedule it weekly or monthly.
4. Read changed rows from the Dataset or connect a webhook/automation to the run result.

OECD states a two-hour HTTP cache lifetime on current responses. This Actor also offers a conservative 0-120 minute parsed-response cache. It sends at most two data requests per run, counts retries against that ceiling, honors bounded Retry-After, and returns explicit free error rows when a retry cannot be made safely.

Billing and safety

The Actor uses pay per event: one start event and one fdi-dataset-checked event per successfully delivered dataflow row containing public observations. Empty or source-error rows are not charged as result events. The Apify SDK may omit its implicit free default Dataset event from the resolved price map. If that key is present, it must be exact numeric positive zero; -0, strings and other malformed values fail closed.

Production baselines advance only after the atomic Dataset delivery receipt confirms a paid result event with a finite numeric positive-integer chargedCount. Missing, string, zero, fractional, NaN or infinite receipt values are fatal uncertain delivery. Pricing drift, unreadable budget state, rate limits, source failures and uncertain delivery fail closed and preserve the prior baseline. Local development runs intentionally do not advance the production-style baseline.

Source and attribution

Source: OECD foreign direct investment statistics, official SDMX dataflows OECD.DAF.INV:DSD_FDI@DF_FDI_FLOW_AGGR(1.0) and OECD.DAF.INV:DSD_FDI@DF_FDI_POS_AGGR(1.0). Data is adapted by this Actor to calculate delivery-to-delivery deltas. See the OECD API guide and OECD Terms and Conditions.

This Actor is independently maintained and is not an OECD product or endorsement. Source classifications and historical observations can be revised by OECD.