Foreign Direct Investment And The Development Of Agriculture And Agro-industry

Over the last two decades, with the development of economic globalization, international capital has been growing rapidly, foreign direct investment (FDI) has become the main channel of international capital flows and played more and more important roles in the world economy. For this, researchers from home and abroad give full interests and make great achievements. However, there is no denying that some inconsistencies still exist theoretically and empirically in the fields of FDI, which need to further study and complement them.As one of the main part of world economy, China has attracted a huge amount of FDI with the reform and open policies beginning. Especially since 1990s, China is becoming the largest host of FDI among less developed countries (LDCs) and the second largest in the world. By the end of 2004, China approves 508941 foreign enterprises with the total contracted inward FDI US$1096.7 billion and US$562.1 billion actual FDI. Foreign direct investment plays a very important role in contributing to Chinese economic growth and impacts China's development in many ways.Based on inflows of FDI to China, a lot of studies have been conducted. From the present literature and empirical research, most of the studies have focused on the perspective of country and firm-level, few studies have been conducted from the perspective of specific industry. So this study will explore theoretically and empirically the evidence of inflows of FDI to China's agro-industry and present some policy suggestions finally. On the one hand, my work will further examine some of the previous inconsistent results. On the other hand, this work will help China to use FDI in a favorable way and promote the development of Chinese agro-industry, even improve farm's income and rural development to some extent.This dissertation is organized simply three parts as follows. In part one (see Chapter I and Chapter 2), the background, the purpose and the methodology of this study will be introduced, which also gives an overview of the present studies and comments them.In part two (see Chapter 3, 4, 5, 6), the objectives are to explore empirically the impacts of FDI on agricultural growth, the effects of FDI on agricultural technology transfer, the relationship between FDI and agro-food trade in China, the market structure effects of FDI in China's agro-industry basing on theoretical analysis, and finally presents some conclusions respectively. It's the most important part of this dissertation.In part three (see Chapter 7, 8, 9), the determinants of FDI in China's agro-food industry are examined empirically, then according to the above theoretical and empirical results, by way of learning foreign experiences in using FDI in agro-industry, some concluding remarks and policy suggestions are presented.