负责任的国际投资:ESG与中国OFDI

Responsible Multinational Investment: ESG and Chinese OFDI

伴随着各国愈发追求可持续发展的时代变局,驱动跨国公司对外直接投资(OFDI)的特定优势内涵已发生深刻变化。负责任的国际直接投资意味着,企业对环境、社会和治理因素(ESG)的重视以及由此构建的ESG优势,可能成为推动OFDI的新型竞争优势。为此,本文尝试探究了ESG优势对中国企业OFDI的影响及其作用机制,并利用2009—2019年A股上市公司数据展开检验。研究发现,ESG优势能够显著而稳健地提升上市企业对外投资的可能性和规模。ESG的投资促进效应主要体现在绿地投资且在投资决策方面对非国有企业的作用略明显。机制分析表明,ESG优势不仅能从内部降低企业跨境投资的资本成本(主要是债务成本),缓解融资约束,而且在面临不同的东道国ESG时,可以灵活利用社会和治理方面的优势、克服环境因素引起的外来者劣势,进而提升企业的OFDI活动。本文较早地证实了企业ESG优势对其国际直接投资的积极影响,这不仅在微观上揭示了负责任企业在建设更高水平开放型经济新体制中日益重要的地位,而且对于向全球传递负责任企业和大国形象、实现人类命运共同体理念具有重要启示。

The growing emphasis on sustainability is reshaping the business philosophy of enterprises. Beyond economic interests, enterprises should also consider stakeholders’ interests and pay attention to environment, social and governance(ESG) and ESG’s subsequent influences. ESG practice, a business decision overcoming the parochial viewpoint of regarding maximum profit as the only goal, has attracted much attention from policymakers and researchers. Academically, while issues about how ESG affects business performance have been extensively explored, most studies still focus on the role of ESG within the enterprise boundary. There is little literature discussing the effect of ESG on the extension of enterprise boundary. To fix the gap, this paper attempts to explore the impact of ESG in the context of multinational investment, and discuss how ESG advantages affect outward foreign direct investment(OFDI) as well as its potential mechanism.As for the driving factors of OFDI, the classical eclectic theory of ownership, location, internalization(hereinafter referred to as the OLI theory), which is based on the principle of profit maximization, suggests that the OFDI occurs only when enterprises own the ownership advantages, internalization advantages and location advantages at the same time. In addition, the OLI theory claims that the ownership advantage is the most important one. However, the idea of sustainability puts forward higher requirements on foreign direct investment, which means enterprises should also consider environmental, social and governance benefits except for economic interests. In this context, the paper argues that the internal factors driving foreign direct investment are no longer limited to traditional competitive advantages;instead, they should include ESG advantage as well. Enterprises that value and implement ESG practices can gain valuable scarce resources, institutions and capabilities concerning environmental protection, social responsibility and corporate governance. The resulting ESG advantages break through the boundary of traditional ownership advantage and form new asset advantages, such as green technology and reputation. More importantly, the inherent legitimacy of ESG advantages is conducive to overcoming the legitimacy problem of overseas investment faced by multinational enterprises. Therefore, ESG advantages are expected to be another key factor driving OFDI in the sustainable development.To explore the influence of ESG advantages on OFDI, this paper uses data from Chinese A-share markets between 2009 and 2019 and finds that ESG advantages have a significantly positive effect on multinational investment activities, no matter on OFDI decisions or on OFDI scales. Besides, the heterogeneity analysis shows that the investment promotion of ESG advantages is more obvious in greenfield investment, as well as private enterprises’ OFDI decisions. And then, the mechanism analyses demonstrate that ESG advantage can reduce the capital cost of OFDI, especially debt cost, and ease financial constraints. Moreover, when confronted with host countries with different ESG levels, ESG advantages also can achieve the promotion effect via utilizing advantages on social and governing aspects and overcoming the liability of foreignness caused by environmental disparity among countries. Those results indicate that ESG practice partly rooted in China has a positive effect on enterprises’ internationalization process and the expansion of their boundaries through OFDI.The academic contributions of this paper are as follows. Firstly, this paper introduces the concept of enterprises’ ESG advantages and incorporates it into the OLI theoretical framework to expand the driving factors of OFDI. It not only enriches the theory of OFDI and literature related to ESG, but also has significant implications for thinking about how to construct the new international competitive advantage in theory. Secondly, the paper studies the mechanisms behind how ESG advantages influence OFDI from the points of view of financial constraints and liability of foreignness concerning ESG, which provides the emerging market a reference about the transnational investment practice and the sources of liability. Thirdly, to overcome endogeneity problems, this paper utilizes external variability in terms of the number and market value of ESG funds having a shareholding in the enterprise and constructs two useful instrument variables, which provides an important tool to deal with the endogeneity problem of ESG studies.