摘要
Does Chinese outward foreign direct investment really promote export?Most papers have come to positive conclusions.Upon reviewing these papers,this paper contributes by correcting model misspecification,wrong variable selection and estimation methods which are prevalent in existing studies,and reexamines the relationship using panel data from 2003 to 2014.The results indicate that:on average,the point estimate of the elasticity between Chinese outward foreign direct investment and export trade is at most 0.073,and it’s not statistically significant.Sub-sample regressions show that,Chinese investment in developed economies slightly substitutes export while investment in developing economies complements export.But these effects disappear when country specific effects are controlled.Year-by-year regressions show that,the complementary effect of OFDI on export is on a steady rise.But if we take the regression coefficients and the quantitative difference between OFDI and export into consideration,the effect is indeed negligible.
