| The deepening of economic and trade investment in the world and the increasingly frequent production and operation activities of transnational corporations in the global scope urge countries to form an interdependent economic development model.As the world’s second largest economy,Chinese enterprises,with the strong support of the government,have actively carried out international exchanges and cooperation and participated in the division of labor in the world.At the same time,the proposal of the"Belt and Road" initiative has created a new pattern of China’s opening to the outside world.The scale of Chinese enterprises’ investment has continued to expand,and their international status has gradually risen.However,when Chinese enterprises are embracing development opportunities,global carbon dioxide(CO2)emissions are increasing rapidly,and climate changes such as global warming and glacier melting has severely restricted the sustainable development of the economy and society.To protect the ecological environment on which survival depends,countries around the world have reached a consensus on the low-carbon and green socio-economic development.Against this background,there are some international public opinions that Chinese outbound investment threatens the environmental quality of host countries.It is believed that to achive the carbon emission reduction target,China transfers its pollution-intensive industries to the host country in the form of foreign investment so as to achieve a winwin situation of economic development and environmental improvement while worsening the ecological environment of the recipient country.Such public opinion seriously restricts the smooth implementation of China’s "Going out" strategy and the"Belt and Road" initiative.To this end,it is of great significance to objectively evaluate the carbon emission effect of Chinese enterprises’ oversea investment and explore the internal specific mechanism to respond to such doubts and promote the healthy and longterm development of China’s enterprises.Based on this,to provide effective reference for promoting the greening of China’s outward foreign direct investment(OFDI)and facilitating carbon emission reduction,our paper combine with the simultaneous equation model,the quasi natural experiment,and spatial econometric methods to carry out a comprehensive assessment of the impact of the implementation of China’s "Belt and Road" initiative(B&RI)and the increase of OFDI on the host country’s carbon emissions.This paper first deduces the influence mechanism and internal path of Chinese enterprises’ outbound investment on CO2 emissions by constructing a theoretical model.Then,based on the policy perspective,68 countries in the sample data are divided into treatment group and control group,the difference-in-difference(DID)method is used to test the carbon emission and carbon intensity effects of the implementation of the B&RI in China by taking the B&RI as the standard natural experiment,and a series of evaluations are conducted on the robustness and effectiveness of the estimation results.In addition,the internal influence mechanism between variables is also discussed.The estimated results show that the implementation of the B&RI aggravates the greenhouse effect of the host country while reducing its carbon emissions per unit output value.In addition,the implementation of this initiative will promote the expansion of the host country’s economic scale and improve energy efficiency,but the effect on the industrial structure optimization is not obvious;at the same time,the positive promote effect of economic scale on CO2 emissions is obviously higher than the inhibition effect of energy efficiency on CO2 emissions,thus hindering the mitigation of greenhouse effect.Also applying the sample data of 68 countries across the globe,based on the mechanism perspective and three effects theory,this paper constructs simultaneous equations to explore the theoretical path of how Chinese enterprises’ outbound investment affects the host country’s CO2 emissions.The regional heterogeneity of the B&RI countries and non-B&RI countries is analyzed.The results indicate that Chinese enterprises’ outbound investment can reduce the CO2 emissions of non-B&RI countries while exacerbating the greenhouse effect of the whole sample and B&RI countries.Meanwhile.China’s outbound investment activities can significantly decrease the carbon emission intensity of host countries.The results of influence mechanism show that in the whole sample and B&RI countries,the expansion of Chinese enterprises’investment scale will aggravate the greenhouse effect of host countries by expanding the economic aggregate,accelerating the green innovation of enterprises’ technologies,and inhibiting the low-carbon industrial transition.In non-B&RI countries,China’s OFDI will significantly expand the host country’s economic scale,accelerate the pace of green innovation,promote the upgrading and optimization of industrial structure,and thus reduce CO2 emissions.In addition,this paper empirically evaluates the spatial spillover effect of Chinese enterprises,outbound investment on host countries from a spatial perspective by building a spatial panel econometric model.Furthermore,this study also analyzes the competitive strategies of host countries to introduce Chinese investment by using spatial effect coefficient and game theory.It is found that there is a significant spatial correlation between the CO2 emissions of the sample countries,and the investment of the host country by Chinese enterprises intensifies the greenhouse effect of the host country,while it has a significant inhibitory effect on the CO2 emissions of the neighboring countries.Through coefficient analysis,it can be found that the local governments of the host country will adopt differentiated competition strategy in the process of introducing foreign investment.Based on the related theoretical analysis and empirical research,this study put forward policy suggestions on facilitating the greening of China’s OFDI and carbon emission reduction from four aspects:encouraging technology-seeking investment,rationally distributing investment industries,developing differentiated strategies based on investment location,and focusing on the establishment of multilateral cooperation mechanism among countries along the Belt and Road. |
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