Location Choice of China’s OFDI in “Belt and Road” Countries – Empirical Evidence from Big Data

¹ SILC Business School, Shanghai University, Jiading District Shanghai China
² SILC Business School, Shanghai University, Jiading District Shanghai China

^a wumaoguo@shu.edu.cn
^b yuting_zhang1@163.com

Abstract

With the continuous development of globalization, China has been devoted to promoting the degree of openness. The implementation of “the Belt and Road” initiative brings huge development prospects for China’s OFDI. Utilizing a panel data set consisting of a total of 51 countries along the “the Belt and Road” from 2007 to 2016, this paper establishes an empirical model and examines the influencing factors of the location choice on China’s OFDI in “the Belt and Road” countries. This paper collects comprehensive country-level data of 51 countries along “the Belt and Road” with Python. The number of investment enterprises in the host country published by the Open Directory of Record Results of Overseas Investment Enterprises (Institutions) is used as the explanatory variable. This paper conducts Poisson’s regression to study the influencing factors of location choice. According to the empirical results, bilateral trade agreements can help reduce the difficulties that China may face with in investing and facilitate China to access the host country for investment. In addition, Chinese enterprises may invest in countries where the degree of governance is moderate based on the negative impact on China’s investment in “the Belt and Road” countries. Also, China may invest in countries where the natural resources are poor considering the degree of governance even though natural resources have a positive effect on investment. Furthermore, the level of infrastructure construction in the host country has a positive effect on China’s direct investment in countries along “the Belt and Road”. Besides, good political environment can attract Chinese enterprises to invest in countries along “the Belt and Road”.