A Study On The Impact Of Chinese OFDI On Manufacturing Export Competitiveness

In recent years,China’s outward foreign direct investment(OFDI)has been expanding in terms of investment scale and investment areas.2021,China’s OFDI flow was US$178.8 billion,of which nearly 80% went to manufacturing,transportation,wholesale and retail,various business services and other fields,with individual investments in each field exceeding US$10 billion.Modern investment theories have confirmed the existence of complementary,substitution and other related relationships between OFDI and trade.Against the background of continuous and rapid growth of OFDI,it is of great theoretical and practical significance to make full use of China’s OFDI to enhance the competitiveness of China’s manufacturing exports,in order to accelerate the transformation and upgrading of domestic manufacturing industries and form a stable,balanced and innovation-driven high-quality development model.Based on the existing investment theories,this paper first analyzes in detail the theory of OFDI and the theory of export competitiveness,and further deepens the study of the relevant motives of OFDI and the theoretical mechanism of its influence on export competitiveness.This paper argues that the main motives of OFDI include strategic assetseeking,efficiency-seeking,resource-seeking and market-seeking,and different OFDI motives affect export competitiveness in different ways.Secondly,this paper selects the panel data of 30 provinces(cities)except Tibet for 15 years from 2004 to 2018,and analyzes and measures the manufacturing export competitiveness of relevant provinces at the interprovincial panel level;and analyzes the current situation of OFDI,the current situation of manufacturing and sub-sector exports of each province accordingly.Finally,this paper measures OFDI with stock data and manufacturing export competitiveness with the index of revealed comparative advantage,and analyzes the relevant issues by conducting Hausman test on the obtained sample data and choosing a relatively suitable fixed-effects model,and conducts regressions at the aggregate level and sub-sample level respectively to study the impact of OFDI on manufacturing export competitiveness The reliability of the findings is fully verified.The empirical results remain unchanged after the robustness test.The results show that,firstly,OFDI can significantly contribute to the improvement of manufacturing export competitiveness.Secondly,by industry,OFDI can significantly improve the export competitiveness of technology-intensive and capital-intensive manufacturing industries,but the effect of OFDI on the export competitiveness of laborintensive manufacturing industries is not significant.Finally,by region,OFDI in eastern and western regions of China can significantly promote their manufacturing export competitiveness,but the effect of OFDI in western region on western manufacturing export competitiveness is negative and insignificant.Accordingly,the article proposes suggestions from the government’s perspective,such as adapting to local conditions,attaching importance to talent training,reducing government intervention,and optimizing and improving FDI,and also from the enterprises’ perspective,such as leading by innovation,prioritizing talent,and improving risk awareness.The characteristic of this paper is that most of the studies on investment and export competitiveness focus on the study of the impact of FDI on export competitiveness,which is the focus of most of the existing related literature,while there are relatively few studies on the impact of OFDI on export competitiveness.This paper delves into the relationship between OFDI and export competitiveness,providing a more diverse perspective for the study of the impact of OFDI on exports.Second,most of the existing literature on OFDI focuses on the macro level,while this paper selects the manufacturing industry,which has a greater impact on China’s economic development,as the research object,and studies the relationship between OFDI and manufacturing export competitiveness from the perspective of sub-provinces and sub-industries.