Foreign Direct Investment And Regional Economic Development In China

International direct investment has been heading the mainstream of world economic development and economic globalization and the core essence of the economic globalization has been the collocation and restructuring of factors of production, adjustment and transfer of industrial structure, and arrangement and distribution of corporate value chain and industry chain on global scale. And international direct investment remains the major approaches of achieving the above global collocation, restructuring of factors of production and transfer of economic structure. In recent years the study of international direct investment and China's opening-up economic development under the context of economic globalization has been a boom in China but so far it is still in infantility and few researches have been done especially from the perspectives of regional economic development and the relation or interaction between that and foreign direct investment. Bearing that angle in mind this dissertation intends to deeply explore the impacts of foreign direct investment upon the economic growth, industrial upgrading, institutional transition, and so on in China's regional economic development. Special attention has been given to the exploration of the role, functional mechanism and effect of the foreign direct investment in capital creation, technological progress, development of human resources, adjustment of industrial structure, and regional institutional transition in China's regional economic development through the methodological combination of theoretical analyses and positivist researches and of macro/micro, static/dynamic, historical/horizontal, variant/structural approaches in concrete study under the framework of modern economic development theory.The openness of region and cross-regional flow of factors of production are extremely important to regional economic development. Due to the regional disparities in intrinsic conditions of factors of production the roles of foreign direct investment may vary in regional economic development. But it is just these disparities that are to be converged through the driving of foreign direct investment. These are the efforts which have been distinctively made:Firstly, a combination of theoretical analysis and positivist research is introduced in the approaches of dimensions from regional to industrial and from variant to structural in the study of the relation between foreign direct investment and the regional economic development. This approach of multi-dimension and wide scale is rather novel in such studies. "Region" is conceptually relative and the effect of foreign direct investment on a country is not the simple summation of effects of different regions. Besides regional disparities are present in any country. That is why it would be much more significant to find out how consequential foreign direct investment is to different regions and the causes of these consequences than to merely touch on the effect on the whole country. It is more so especially to those countries with greater regional diversity.Secondly, a combination of methods of historical time sequence and horizontal transection is adopted in analyzing. Historically, the impact of foreign direct investment on China's all regions and the extent and causes of the impact are carefully traced in positivist approach. Horizontally, comparative study of the different impacts of foreign direct investment on China's different regions is carried out and the relevance between the disparity of regional distribution of foreign direct investment and China's disparity of regional development is positively analyzed. The finding is that the disparity of regional distribution of foreign direct investment holds very accountable to China's disparity of regional development and the convergence effect is evident in China's regional development. The possible choices of approaches in achieving that convergence from disparity are also laid out.Thirdly, an evaluation system of regional foreign investment is proposed. It is very necess...