Research On The Restructuring Role Of Japan’s Overseas Direct Investment

Different countries have different industrial structure and different industrial structure usually reflects the different stages of development between countries. At the new decade, China’s old development mode of relying on exports and investment cann’t continue, and there are some problem with our industrial structure, such as the excess production capacity of cement and steel, wasting too much material and destruction of environment. Prime minister Li Keqiang has always stressed the importance of China’s industry transformation. As the economic relationship between China and other countries in the world become more and more closely, this article trys to prove that we develop overseas direct investment can help the restructuring of our domestic industrial structure, and then to provide a perspective to China’s further development. The reason why we choose Japan, is that the ODI of Japan is far more than its FDI, but to China, FDI paly a more role than ODI, that is to say, Japan is a more pure object to explain this function mechanism of ODI.This article first introduce the related theory of industrial structure and overseas direct investment, it is worth mentioning that there are two kinds of ODI theory, developed country’s theory and developing country’s theory, Japan belongs to the former. I also especially introduce the research of two Japanese scholar, "the flying-geese model" of Kaname Akamatsu and "Marginal industry transfer theory" of Kojima, finally I look back to the history of Japan’s ODI development and the adjustment of industrial structure at the same time.After the second world war, Japan reduced to ruins, but in just ten years time, the Japanese economy restored and exceeded the pre-war level. Japan’s cable technology cooperation with India in 1951 can be viewed as the starting point of Japan’s overseas direct investment, in the 60s, the ODI amount quickly soared to 2 billion dollar and just in this period, Japan began to change its labor-intensive industrial structure to capital-intensive industrial structure, in the 70s, Japan continue to towards to the technology-intensive industrial structure. I believe, the history always repeat, so Japan’s experience can be used as reference for the future development of our country, this is also the original intention of this paper.