美国党派政治与中国对美直接投资的区位选择

Partisan Politics and the Location Choice of China's FDI toward the United States

长期以来,党派政治在美国吸引外资政策方面发挥了重要作用。在此背景下,作者运用国际政治经济学和国际经济学的分析框架,提出党派政治影响外资区位选择的假说。为了证明这一假说,作者采用2009-2012年中国对美国各州对外直接投资的数据进行了实证检验。结果表明,美国各州党派政治倾向对中国企业对美直接投资的区位选择具有显著影响,并且对绿地投资影响比跨国并购更加显著;在市场规模、劳动力成本、税收、贸易规模等其他因素给定的前提下,中国企业会优先选择在民主党支持率较高的州进行投资。在实证结果的基础上,作者进一步分析了党派政治影响中国企业对美直接投资区位选择的内在机理。从静态分配效应看,外资流入引起东道国对劳动需求增加,导致工资水平提高和资本收益下降。该分配效应使劳动力充裕的所有者鼓励外资流入,而资本充裕的所有者倾向于实施限制外资的政策。从动态角度看,由于外资投入的资产专用性,外国投资者希望将投入与东道国利益捆绑,减少政府的机会主义行为;劳动者联盟与外国投资者构成一种互补而非相互竞争的关系,其结果是劳动者联盟会比资本所有者联盟更欢迎外资流入。

Partisan politics has played an important role in the change of the U.S.foreign economic policy for a long time.Each state of the US acts individually to manipulate the foreign investment policy.Under this circumstance,we use the framework of international political economics and international economics to put forward the hypothesis that partisan politics influences FDI's location choice.To test it,this paper makes an empirical research about the Chinese FDI in the U.S.It proves that partisan politics bias of each state has remarkable effect on the FDI's location choice by the data from 2009 to 2012.The effect is more significant for greenfield investment than M&A investment.When the factors such as market size,labor cost,tax level and trade volume are controlled,Chinese firms are inclined to invest in the state which is governed by the left wing party.Based the empirical results,this paper analyzes the mechanism of partisan effect on the FDI's location choice.From the view of static distribution effect,FDI inflow will increase the labor demand,raise the wage and reduce the capital return.This distribution effect will cause pro-labor government to encourage FDI inflow and pro-capital government restrict it.From the view of dynamic effect,foreign investors hope to bundle their interests with the local government to reduce the opportunistic behavior because of asset specificity.The labor unions build complementary rather than competition relationship with foreign investors,so labor unions take a more positive attitude toward FDI than capital unions.These results have important implication for the theory and practice of Chinese firms' outward direct investment.