The Global Production Chain Embedding and Chinese Firms’ Outward Foreign Direct Investment

Chen Lin; Fang Chao; Tian Suhua; Yu Xiaoyan

doi:doi:10.16538/j.cnki.jfe.2019.10.007

Summary

In the last few years, one of the fundamental changes in international trade is the emergence of global value chains（GVCs）, and the increasingly fragmentation of production. Under this background, Chinese firms’ " going global” for foreign direct investment（FDI）might mean " going global” for embedding GVCs. However, few researches investigate firms’ FDI behaviors from the perspective of GVCs, especially from the impact of embedding in GVCs on FDI decision-making and location choice.

This paper uses industrial enterprise data compiled by China’s National Bureau of Statistics, import and export trade data collected by China’s General Administration of Customs, FDI data from Ministry of Commerce and WIOD data. We calculate upstreamness initiated by Antràs, et al.（2012）and Chor, et al.（2014）, which measures the position of Chinese manufacturing firms in GVCs. We also examine how this position determines the decision of outward foreign direct investment（OFDI）. We find that firms at both ends of GVCs are more likely to invest overseas. That is to say, firms with upstream import embedding position and downstream export embedding position are more likely to invest abroad. These results are robust when using alternative measures, considering the endogeneity and the rare event issues. Furthermore, we also find that firms’ different investment motivations and regional choices are followed in light of firms’ GVC position.

This paper contributes to the existing literature in two aspects: First, we take a further step to investigate Chinese firms’ " going out” reasons from a new perspective such as GVCs; Second, different from the existing researches focusing on calculating the added-value of exports at the national or industry level, this paper measures the embedding position of global production chains at the firm level. It empirically analyzes the different characteristics of firms with different production chain embedding locations in their OFDI, and further discusses the impact of trade-based specialization in GVCs on global production networks such as OFDI motivations and OFDI location selections, based on the heterogeneity of OFDI.

Our research, to a certain extent, reveals the inherent logic of Chinese firms participating in global trade and global production networks, helps the government make more targeted " going out” policies under the " B&R” initiative, provides differentiated policy support to firms with different GVC divisions when " going out”, and gives better guidance to firms on FDI.