Publication: Institutions and Foreign Direct Investment : China versus the Rest of the World
No Thumbnail Available
Date
2009
ISSN
0305750X
Published
2009
Editor(s)
Abstract
Weak institutions impede foreign direction investment (FDI), yet China attracts massive FDI despite global media spotlighting its institutional infirmities. Standard institutional quality variables poorly track rapid transformations, like China's regime shift following Den Xiaoping's 1993 Southern Tour. Economy track record usefully augments these variables in such cases. Cross-country regressions controlling for institutional quality and economy track record reveal China's FDI inflow unexceptional. Rather, China's FDI inundation resembles analogous post-reform East Bloc events. Arguments that China's FDI inflow is inefficiently large because weak institutions deter domestic investment while special initiatives attract FDI are thus either unsupported or not unique to China.
Link to Data Set
Associated content
Other publications in this report series
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue
Citations
Collections
Related items
Showing items related by metadata.
Publication Does "Good Government" Draw Foreign Capital? Explaining China's Exceptional Foreign Direct Investment Inflow(World Bank, Washington, DC, 2007-04)China is now the world's largest destination of foreign direct investment (FDI), despite assessments highlighting its institutional deficiencies. But this FDI inflow corresponds closely to predicted FDI flows into China from a model that predicts FDI inflow based on government quality indicators and controls and is estimated across a sample of other weak-institution countries. The only real discrepancy is that, if government quality is measured by constraints on executive power, China receives somewhat more FDI than the model predicts. This might reflect an underestimation of the strength of these constraints in China, a unique institutional setting for FDI operations, FDI based on expected future institutional improvements, or a unique Chinese model of development. The authors conclude that Ockham's razor disfavors the last. They also note that FDI may be elevated because Chinese institutions protect foreign firms better than domestic ones.Publication Impact of Local Content Restrictions and Barriers against Foreign Direct Investment in Services : The Case of Kazakhstan's Accession to the World Trade Organization(2008)We employ a computable general equilibrium model of the Kazakh economy to assess the effect of accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO). Our model incorporates foreign direct investment by multinational business service providers and by multinational oil and gas companies; it contains endogenous productivity effects in both goods and services markets through a Dixit-Stiglitz (1977) framework. Our model is innovative in that we assess the effect of local content provisions for multinational oil and gas companies, provisions that are highly contentious in WTO accession negotiations. We show that our model features are crucial to the results, as the estimated gains are more than ten times larger than the gains from a constant return-to-scale model.Publication Substitution between Foreign Capital in China, India, the Rest of the World, and Latin America: Much Ado about Nothing?(2008)This paper explores the impact of the emergence of China and India on Foreign Capital Stocks (FCS) in other economies. Using bilateral FCS data from 1990-2003 and drawing from the Knowledge-Capital Model of multinational enterprises to control for fundamental determinants of FCS across countries, the evidence suggests that the impact of foreign capital in China and India on other countries' FCS has been positive. This finding is robust across different specifications and estimation techniques. There is surprisingly weak evidence of substitution in manufacturing FCS away from Central America/Mexico in favor of China, and from Southern Cone countries to India, but these findings are not robust to the use of alternative estimation techniques. In sum, fears of a global competition for FDI seem misplaced, and policymakers concerned about attracting foreign investors should focus their efforts on the fundamentals determinants of FDI.Publication To Share or Not to Share: Does Local Participation Matter for Spillovers from Foreign Direct Investment?(2008)This study hypothesizes that the ownership structure in foreign investment projects affects the extent of vertical and horizontal spillovers from foreign direct investment (FDI) for two reasons. First, affiliates with joint domestic and foreign ownership may face lower costs of finding local suppliers of intermediates and thus may be more likely to engage in local sourcing than wholly owned foreign subsidiaries. This in turn may lead to higher productivity spillovers to local producers in the supplying sectors (vertical spillovers). Second, the fact that multinationals tend to transfer less sophisticated technologies to their partially owned affiliates than to wholly owned subsidiaries, combined with the better access to knowledge through the participation of the local shareholder in partially owned projects, may facilitate more knowledge absorption by local firms in the same sector (horizontal spillovers). The analysis based on a Romanian firm-level data set produces evidence consistent with these hypotheses. The results suggest that vertical spillovers are associated with projects with shared domestic and foreign ownership but not with fully owned foreign subsidiaries. They also indicate that the negative competition effect of FDI inflows is lower in the case of partially owned foreign investments as it is mitigated by larger knowledge dissipation within the sector.Publication China and Central and Eastern European Countries : Regional Networks, Global Supply Chain or International Competitors?(2009)China has become leading recipients of foreign direct investment (FDI). Meanwhile, an increasing share of global FDI is going to many Central and Eastern European countries (CEECs). What is the relationship between inward FDI of China and the CEECs? We conceptualize the relationship according to three alternative paradigms: (1) China and the CEECs each exist in its own regional production network, with no linkage between FDI flows into China and into CEECs; (2) China and the CEECs together comprise a global production network, so that China's FDI is positively related to CEECs' FDI; and (3) FDI into China is a substitute for FDI into the CEECs, with the correlation being negative. In this paper, we study empirical estimates of this issue for 15 CEECs for 1990-2004 using four different econometric approaches: FGLS with Random effects, FGLS with fixed effects, EC2SLS and GMM. The result supports the conclusion that China's inward FDI does not crowd out CEECs' inward FDI. In fact, it shows that in some regressions FDI flows in these two regions are moderately complementary. Our analysis also confirms the importance for FDI flows of determinants such as market size, degree of trade liberalization, labor quality and a healthy global FDI supply.
Users also downloaded
Showing related downloaded files
No results found.