Research On The Impact Of The “Belt And Road” Initiative On The OFDI Location Selection Of Chinese Listed Companie

Along with economic globalization and the continued promotion of the Chinese government’s “Belt and Road initiative”,China’s total OFDI inflows are steadily increasing.In this strategic context,the question of how to encourage enterprises to invest in countries along the “Belt and Road” route and to ensure a reasonable choice of location is an important practical issue.More and more scholars on this area are also gradually moving away from studies that only look at some traditional influencing factors such as market size,resource endowment and level of openness to the outside world,and are beginning to look at factors such as institutional environment and institutional distance.This paper will further examine the impact of the “Belt and Road initiative” on the locational decision-making process of OFDI by taking the institutional environment variability as an entry point..Based on transaction cost theory and institutional theory,this paper studies the far-reaching impact of the implementation of the “Belt and Road initiative” on the selection of overseas direct investment regions by Chinese listed enterprises.Since the institutional environment of the home country is not a single central level,there is regional heterogeneity.The central government responds positively to the “Belt and Road initiative” and implements it comprehensively,while regional governments have different attitudes toward the “Belt and Road initiative” national policies due to the differences in institutional environments,which have different impacts on corporate investment.This perspective enriches our understanding of the influence of home country institutional environment on corporate investment behavior and expands the research in this area.This paper adopts a panel generalized least squares model based on a sample of overseas investment data of Chinese A-share listed enterprises from the CSMAR database.The results show that the “Belt and Road Initiative” has a positive impact on investment in Chinese listed firms,while the career of government officials and the nature of firm ownership have negative and positive moderating effects respectively.In other words,although the “Belt and Road Initiative” has accelerated the internationalization process by pushing Chinese enterprises to go abroad quickly,there are differences in the attitudes and responsiveness of different levels of government to the central government’s policies.The longer the career horizon of provincial and ministerial officials,the more passionate they are in pursuing promotion and development,thus focusing on local economic development and avoiding industrial outflows and loss of economic benefits,which in turn will reduce the foreign activities of local enterprises and thus reduce investments in countries along the “Belt and Road” route.In addition,state owned enterprises are better able to take advantage of the positive aspects of the “Belt and Road Initiative” due to their natural national nature and their active adherence to and practice of national systems and policies.Overall,this study provides theoretical and practical implications for firms at different governmental levels and firms with different ownership in emerging economies that wish to use national policies to promote firm internationalization.Finally,it also gives targeted suggestions and countermeasures from both government and enterprise levels to provide useful references for China’s listed enterprises to make OFDI location decisions and thus improve investment efficiency.