The Research On The Adjustment And Effect Of Foreign Investment Polocies Based On Gap Theory

Originated from the “dual-gap model”, gap theory provides important basis for emerging-market countries to attract foreign investment and accelerate their economic development. Having developed from the initial dual-gap theory(on savings gap and foreign exchange gap) to triple-gap theory(on dual gaps plus technology gap) and quadruple-gap theory(triple gaps plus revenue gap), gap theory has a significant guiding on China's foreign investment utilization policy adjustment. In the early days of China's open economy era, the country's construction and development funds could hardly be covered by its domestic savings, and the foreign exchange needed for foreign economic relations was inadequate. Therefore, to make up the gaps of savings and foreign exchange became an important goal of the utilization of foreign investment at the time. The foreign investment promotion strategy of this phase mainly included two aspects: continuously expanding the scales of foreign investment utilization to remedy savings gap and developing foreign- funded export-oriented enterprises to make up the foreign exchange gap. That strategy to utilize foreign investment was consistent with the situation in China at that time. With the continuous inflow of foreign capital on large scales, China's savings gap and foreign exchange gap had been gradually filled, and emerged the phenomenon of rapid increase in the domestic savings and foreign exchange reserves. At this point, it should be said, our country had dealt with the two gaps of dual-gap model successfully, and had entered the era with relatively adequate savings and foreign exchange. However, according to gap theory, there were still huge technology gaps in China's economic development, problems of a great deal of tax loss in foreign enterprise tax revenue, and existence of regional foreign investment imbalance between the east and the middle and the west of the country. Under this background, since entering the new century, China has made corresponding adjustment in foreign investment utilization policies, with the following features: foreign-funded enterprises receive “national treatment ”, the GSP "super national treatment" is canceled, but the restrictions on foreign-funded enterprises are liberalized; to focus on the introduction of high technology foreign-funded enterprises; to enhance the Guidance on foreign investment regions, to introduce more foreign-funded enterprises to invest and settle in the middle and western regions of our country and so on. Such strategy design in line with the essence of the gap theory guidance has achieved certain positive results, making China's utilization of foreign investment change gradually from extensive type to intension type, attracting a number of high-quality technical enterprises, and making the foreign investment regional distribution more reasonable. However, there is insufficiency or some unsolved problems of the policy adjustment of this stage. For example, in our country, the phenomena that the technical spillover effect is not significant and the investment in central and western regions is not balanced in the process of foreign investment utilization still exist. In this regard, efforts should be made to solve these two problems in the next stage of the foreign policy adjustment of our country, fully learning from other countries' experience, guaranteeing technology, making policies that are more conducive to technical spillovers of foreign enterprises, making up the technology gap of our country faster, and further optimizing the regional distribution of foreign investment, narrowing the savings gap.