This week’s announcement that France’s Vivendi will acquire American video game maker Activision for about $9.8 billion, the largest American M&A deal since the credit crunch took hold in July, reflects a growing trend, experts say.

Since July, the 10 largest M&A deals have involved foreign companies acquiring American firms, according to data from Thomson Financial.

“These types of deals bode well for American industry,” a director at Thomson Financial, Richard Peterson, said. “They show that foreign buyers perceive value in the U.S. marketplace, and are willing to put their capital in U.S. operations.”

It wasn’t long ago that American companies were snatching up firms abroad at the same pace. Now, a slowing American economy and the depreciating greenback is putting many of these American acquisitions on hold. “Both the euro and the pound are far stronger than they have been in recent decades,” a finance professor at Northeastern University in Boston, Wes Marple, said. This makes American assets look cheap, he said.

The increase in foreign acquisitions is helping buoy America’s economy by bringing in additional capital and adding jobs, according to a new report published yesterday by the Organization for International Investment. The report, by a professor of international economics at the Tuck School of Business at Dartmouth, Matthew Slaughter, found that America has received $2 trillion in investments as a result of foreign purchases of American companies over the past two decades.

Moreover, foreign-owned companies employ more than 5 million Americans — including 377,000 New Yorkers — and pay them 31.8% more on average than the rest of the private sector.

This trend, which Mr. Slaughter dubs “insourcing,” also helps boost tax revenues because foreign-acquired American companies are taxed by the U.S. government. In 2004, these companies paid $29.9 billion in federal income taxes, or 13.3% of the total paid by American companies.

“The bulk of the revenue generated by a company is deployed in buying raw material and labor in a domestic government,” Mr. Marple said. “Relatively little of it gets exported to the foreign owner in terms of tax dividends.” In addition, foreign firms will have an incentive to invest in American labor and infrastructure, which is good for the American economy, he said.

In another twist, the possibility of a Democratic victory in the 2008 presidential race could also be spurring the sale of American companies to foreign acquirers. “A new administration and a new Congress with a more populist orientation might seek to increase the capital gains tax from present levels,” Mr. Marple said. This may be encouraging domestic owners to sell, so they can “realize their capital gains now, while the tax is lower than it might become.”