The different impacts of home countries characteristics in FDI on Chinese spillover effects: Based on one-stage SFA

Abstract

To study the spillover effects of FDI from different home countries on technical efficiency of China's enterprises, inter-provincial panel data of China from 1998 to 2012 are used as samples in this paper, and with capital, labor and CO2 as inputs, one-stage SFA method is applied to carry out empirical analysis. The results conclude: (1) FDI can bring significant technology spillover effects for our country, but due to great differences in FDI source countries and in various regions of China, the spillover effects of FDI from South Korea and Singapore and FDI from other countries are greater than those of FDI from G7 and FDI from Hong Kong, Macao and Taiwan, and the spillover effects in the Eastern China surpass those in the Western China. (2) The proper marketization degree and human capital level can not only directly promote China's technical efficiency, but also can indirectly promote China's technical efficiency through increasing spillover effects of FDI. (3) In analysis of the threshold effects, FDI from G7 needs the highest threshold values of marketization degree and human capital level, while FDI from South Korea can maximize the improvement of technology spillover effects with the lowest threshold values of marketization degree and human capital level. The findings indicate that provinces of China shall attract foreign investment in gradient method according to local circumstances, in other words, avoid introducing low-quality foreign investment and blindly admiring high-quality foreign investment to ensure smooth and transcending impetus in technical efficiency of domestic enterprises. Meanwhile, efforts have yet to be made to improve marketization degree and human capital level for higher technical efficiency directly and mediately.