| The “going out” strategy is an important measure for China to open up to the outside world.It is of great significance for promoting enterprises to participate in overseas competition and cooperation and to explore the international market.In 2013,General Secretary Xi Jinping proposed the initiative to build the “Silk Road Economic Belt” and the “21st Century Maritime Silk Road”,thus building a major strategic decision of the “the Belt and Road” and becoming an important measure to implement a new round of expansion and opening up.Bilateral Investment Treaties(BITs)are bilateral treaties between capital exporting countries and capital importing countries that are specifically designed for international investment protection.Bilateral investment Treaties provide a stable investment environment for both signatories and are an important guarantee for implementing the “going out” strategy and the “the Belt and Road” strategy.In fact,by the end of 2017,China had signed 128 bilateral investment Treaties in total,and signed bilateral investment agreements with 51 countries along the “the Belt and Road”,becoming one of the countries with the largest number of BITs in the world.Based on the strategy of “the Belt and Road”,this paper studies the impact of bilateral investment Treaties on China's Outward Foreign Direct Investment(OFDI).On the basis of previous studies,this paper further considers the differences in the structure and content of the terms of BITs,which may affect OFDI,and constructs a rating framework for the main provisions of BITs by combining qualitative and quantitative methods.Then,using the analytic hierarchy process to carry out the decision-making empowerment,from the perspective of the degree of protection and promotion of each clause to Chinese enterprises,and finally calculate the quality index of BITs.According to the calculation results,the quality of BITs signed by China and the countries along the “the Belt and Road” is quite different,and the quality index of BITs signed in the early years is generally low,and the BITs with lower scores are mainly concentrated in Central Asia and Central and Eastern Europe.In general,this paper adopts a combination of theoretical and empirical research methods.On the one hand,the mechanism of the heterogeneity of BITs and BITs on OFDI is discussed.On the other hand,the commonly used investment gravity model is used in international economics,and the system GMM estimation method is applied.An empirical study was conducted on China's panel data on 61 sample countries along the “the Belt and Road” in 2004-2016,and explored the impact of BITs on OFDI in countries along the “the Belt and Road”.Considering the substitution/complementation of BITs and the host country's institutional environment,at the same time,the institutional environment of countries with different levels of development is quite different.Therefore,this paper divides the sample countries into whole samples,and the developed country samples and developing country samples for analysis.And under three samples,the heterogeneity of BITs was distinguished and not distinguished,and comparative studies were conducted.The results show that BITs can effectively promote the overseas investment of Chinese enterprises to the contracting countries,and the promotion effect is more significant in developing countries than in developed countries.In other words,it is found that the host country's institutional environment negatively regulates the role of BITs in OFDI when considering the cross-effects of institutional environment and BITs.Moreover,when considering the heterogeneity of BITs clauses,it is found that this positive effect is still significant.It can be seen that the impact of BITs with different quality on OFDI is indeed different,specifically,the more perfect the BITs clause,the higher the degree of investment protection of multinational enterprises,the greater the promotion of OFDI.After differentiating the heterogeneity of BITs,the host country's institutional environment plays almost the same role as the host country does not differentiate the heterogeneity of BITs.It can be seen that the bilateral investment Treaties signed earlier may not be able to meet the needs of China's enterprises for foreign direct investment security,and it is urgent to improve the terms and structure according to the new international investment situation.The results of this study have a strong policy guidance significance for the future Chinese government to formulate the development strategy of overseas investment and the location selection strategy of China's multinational investment enterprises. |
