Emerging Economies, Foreign Direct Investment In Research

Emerging Economies (EEs ) have played an important role in the world economy. Thanks to external economic globalization and internal policies adjustment, EEs, which are represented by BRICs, Vista-5 and Next-11, enjoy an economic boom, and they become important sources of internationl direct investment as a result. During the period, some EEs'enterprises grow into multinational corporations (MNCs), and these emerging MNCs are important players on the world stage. The development of EEs'foreign direct investment (ODI) and emergence of MNCs from EEs are boosting the researches of EEs'ODI. On the whole, there are debates about EEs'ODI: One argument is that traditional ODI theoried can explain EEs'ODI practice, so there is no need for theory innovation, anther argument is that tradtional ODI theories cannot explain EEs'ODI practice, so it needs new ODI theories. Even some researchers insist that traditonal and new ODI theories should be intergrated in order to explain all kinds of ODI practice.From the above practical and academic background, for answering the basic theoretical question of whether traditonal or emerging ODI theory can explain EEs'ODI better, I take Chinese outward direct investment (ODI) for research topic. I adopt normative analysis and positive analysis to study the features, development path, motivation, determinants and effects on home country of Chinese ODI.I conducts four studies. They are as follows.Study 1 is about the features and development path of Emerging Economies'ODI. The purpose of this study is to settle the macro background for the following studies. Since the State Department adopted the ODI policy in 1979, Chines ODI has gone through four stages: initial starting-stage, steady progress-stage, push by adjustment-stage and encouraging development-stage. Nowadays, most of Chines ODI stock are in Asia. HK of China, Cayman Is and British Virgin Is are the major destionation. Most of the stock invested in the industry of business service, financial, wholesale and retail and mining. According to the theory of investment development path (IDP theory), my quantitative analysis shows that the development path of Chinese ODI conforms to the IDP theory.Study 2 is about the motivation of Emerging Economies'ODI. My study shows that there are three kinds motivations of Chinese ODI: asset-exploiting motivation, asset-seeking motivation and institutional arbitrage motivation. Asset-exploiting motivation refers to enterprises's motivation of exploiting the asset they owned, and it includes resource-seeking, market-seeking and efficiency-seeking motivation. Asset-seeking motivation refers to enterprises's motivation of seeking the assets they are lack of. Institutional arbitrage ODI means that Chinese enterprises will arbitrage between host and home by ODI when they are restricted by home countries'related institutions. And my further study proves that the mativation of Chinese ODI is complementary and different during the developing process of Chinese ODI, and is different when enterprises invest in different host countries and industry. What's more, the motivation is also different according to different value chain.Study 3 is about the determinants of Emerging Economies'ODI. From the ecnomic and institutional perspectives, the basis of theoretical assumption, I conduct a quantitative analysis by using related statistical data of Chinese ODI from 1992-2007, and another quantitative analysis using 56 host countries's statistics from 2003-2007. Traditional determinants, such as GDP, GNP per capita, foreign trade, exchange rate, are still palying an important part in Chinese ODI. At the same time, some institutional determinants such as government support and domestic enonomic institution of home country and ecnomic freedom and governement transparency of host countries are also important for Chinese ODI decision.Study 4 is about the home country effects of Emerging Economies'ODI. I focus on the natural resource-acquiring effect, trade effect and reverse technology spillover effect.From this study I arrive at three arguments.(1) China still hasn't acquired much natural resource from ODI compared with the huge domestic resource demand, but we cannot deny the strategic importance of Chinese mining ODI. (2) Time series analysis on related statistical data about China from 1980 to 2008 shows that the trade scale effect and structure effect does exist, but is tiny at present;(3)Time series analysis on the relation between Chines ODI and TFP from 1980 to 2008 shows tha China has acpuired reverse technology spillover from ODI to some extent.My study illustrats that tradtional and emerging ODI theory both can explain EEs'ODI practice to some extent. For a profound understanding of EEs'ODI, I doubt that a single ODI theory is not enough for explain EEs'ODI. If we just emphasize enterprises must have some advantages befor ODI, we cannot explain why EEs'MNCs conduct multinational operations when they are not so strong. If we emphasize EE enterprises promote their advantages by ODI, we will omits the regular pattern of EEs'ODI. So both traditional and emerging ODI theory are needed. The uniqueness of EEs'ODI results from EEs'certain development stage during their economic development and the globalization backgroun they are going through. Certainly The uniqueness needs ODI theory innovation, which can do good for the development of ODI theory. But as the biggest EE, Chinese practice shows that some EEs enterprises'excellence still do not rewrite traditional ODI theory. I expect that traditional ODI theory can explain EEs's ODI as emerging MNCs become more and more stronger and the domestic institution has been improved. At the same time, emerging ODI theory will urge traditional ODI theory to give more attentiong to the influence of institution and enterprise strategies, and in the future, these two kinds will learn from each other and incorporate into each other.Finnally, According to the main conclusions, I analyse the illumination for EEs ODI research and the management of Chinese ODI. Then the imperfection in the dissertation and future research trends are discussed.