Study On The Mode Choices Of Chinese Firms' Overseas Agricultural Investments

China's agriculture development is facing severe domestic and foreign challenges,which makes promoting Chinese firms,overseas agricultural investments urgent and necessary.Since entering the new century,Chinese firms' overseas agricultural investments has been developing rapidly.However,there were barely no micro-level empirical literatues to describle it,which leads to a huge lack of intuitive and concrete understanding of the distribution characteristics and edogenous mechanism of Chinese firms,overseas agricultural investments.Will Chinese firms choose greenfield Investment or cross-border mergers and acquisitions(the first dimension of mode choice)to carry out overseas agricultural investment?Will they prefer a horizontal or vertical overseas investment(the second dimension of mode choice)?Are the mode prefrences in two dimensions correlated?What are the endogenous mechanisms of dominating the mode prefrences?To answer these questions is greatly significant to understand the micro-distribution characteristics and endogenous mechanism of Chinese firms' overseas agricultural investments,and helpful to provide references for government's considerding of support policies and firms' enterprising.Based on the "Overseas Investments List of Chinese Firms" published by China's Minisry of Commerce,we screened the microscopic samples of 3,086 Chinese firms' 3,588 overseas agricultural investment projects,and had the visual description of distribution characteristics of Chinese firms'overseas agricultural investment mode choices.Due to the combination matrix of two mode choice dimensions,we concludes four varieties of firms and four kinds of strategie target types of Chinese firms' overseas agricultural investments.Then,in the perspective of firm heterogeneity to combine the theoretical expectations of three models and frameworks in the frontier of Firm's Orgnization of Interational Production field which are H-M-Y model,N-Y model and H-P-M model,we put forward six inference hypotheses for the endogenous mechanism of Chinese firms' overseas agricultural investment decisions and mode choice distribution.With more than 430,000 panel observations of Chinese agriculture related firms screening from "Chinese Industral Firm Database",,and the panel data samples of 190 host countries' investment business environment and economic characteristics from "World Bank Doing Business Database",we used Logit Regression,Panel Stochastic Effect Logit Model,Fixed Effect Pooled Logit Iterative Reweighted Least Squares Model,Ordered Logit Model,and Poisson Regression Model respetively to testfy the six hypotheses,and had following conclusions.Genreally,Chinese firms' overseas agricultural investment decision and mode choice preferences conform to the inference hypotheses of theoretical expectations,and the firm heterogeneity within connotation as cross-border mobility of total factor productivity and extension as cross-border mobility of firms' core capabilities,dominates the mechanism of Chinese firms' overseas agricultural investment mode choices,and represented by the different distribution charateristics among diverse valua chain links(influence from industry heterogeneity)and host countries(influence from country heterogeneity).Specifically,there are four detailed conlusions.First,the total factor productivity of Chinese agriculture-related firms and the stateownership respectively has significant positive and negative effects on the decision to conduct overseas agricultural investment.Secondly,the firm heterogeneity within connotation of cross-border mobility of total factor productivity has a significant impact on the mode choices of Chinese firms' overseas agricultural investments between greenfield investment and cross-border mergers and acquisition,which is detaily reflected as:industry heterogeneity such as the level of mobile capability need,which value chain links their overseas projects belong to,the level of dependence on agricultural natural resource of oversea projects,enterprising,and country heterogeneity such as the investment business environment charateristics and labor cost of host countries,have significant impact on the mode choices in the first dimension,both impacts are due to the path of the firm heterogeneity.Thirdly,the firm heterogeneity within connotation of cross-border mobility of total factor productivity has a significant impact on the mode choices of Chinese firms' overseas agricultural investments between horizontal and vertical overseas investment preferences,which is detaily reflected as:the level of mobile capability need,the level of dependence on agricultural natural resource of oversea projects' enterprising and cross-border trading cost of host countries hav significant significant impact on the mode choices in the second dimension,but the potential market scale and labor cost does not have significant impact on Chinese firms' oversea investment mode choices in the second dimension as illustrate by the theoretical expectatios.Fourthly,the firm heterogeneity within connotation of cross-border mobility of total factor productivity' dominates the endogenous mechanism of Chinese firms' overseas agricultural investment mode choices in both two dimensions,which makes the mode choices preferences in two dimensions significantly correlated.Finally,based on the conclusions of joint inference and empirical test,we puts forward six policy suggestions for supporting the development of Chinese firms' overseas agricultural investment such as:implement diversified support policy based on diverse mode choices and strengthen information,training and service of international agricultural development.Last,we make a prospect of four forwarding issues worthy of further study in the future.