Research On The Spatial Evolution And Driving Mechanism Of China's Direct Investment In The United States

Foreign direct investment (FDI) is one of the most important powers to promote economic globalization and a vital way for countries all over the world taking part in the international division of labor. As the largest developing country, China has attracted a great deal of FDI since reform and opening-up and now is the main destination of FDI, which plays a positive role in China's economic development. Through the way of FDI and promoting the "Going out" Strategy, the process of China's outward foreign direct investment (COFDI) facilitation is accelerating. Then COFDI gains a rapid develop-ment. The United States, a country of the most advanced economies and absorbing the most of the foreign capitals accumulatively, has the leading position in economic envi-ronment, academic research and technological innovation, infrastructure, policy system and so forth. And it's a consuming nation with a low saving rate, so the high consump-tion capacity of residents has a strong attraction to FDI. China and the United States are the major economies all over the world. Along with the deepening of bilateral economic and trade relations, the level of mutually direct investment has been improved.The size of COFDI to the United States has been increasing rapidly since 2000. Till now, the United States has become the largest destination of COFDI. The invest-ment activities of China to the United States have involved 46 states. However, due to the different geographical environment, the imbalance in the level of social and eco-nomic development and regional legal system and policies, the investment environment has been divided into different levels. So it affects the ability to attract investment, re-sulting in the dynamic evolution of the spatial pattern of COFDI in the United States. What are the characteristics of spatial evolution of COFDI in the United States? Is there the existence of agglomeration? What are the driving factors of spatial evolution? All these issues are urgently need to be solved.Currently, the related research has been concentrated on the macro level analysis of motivation, location choice, obstacles and countermeasure of COFDI in the United States. And the micro level analysis of the states in spatial pattern and the selection me-chanism is not popular. This paper takes 50 states and the District of Columbia as the research objects, focuses on the characteristics of spatial evolution and driving mechan- ism of COFDI in the United States, and tries to reveal the distribution pattern and de-veloping tendency of COFDI in the United States based on the spatial perspective, in order to provide some references of the location selection for Chinese enterprises.All the data is from the Rhodium Group website, the Chinese Ministry of Com-merce, the Bureau of Economic Analysis, the U.S. Census Bureau, National Science Foundation and other relevant departments of the United States. Combining with the theoretical analysis method, summarizing a great number of related literatures from the domestic and abroad, and based on foreign direct investment theories and location theo-ries, along with the method of geographic concentration index, coefficient of variation, the spatial autocorrelation and the ArcGIS spatial visualization method, this paper ana-lyses the evolutionary process and the developing tendency of COFDI in the United States. By using the generalized method of moments (GMM) to build a dynamic panel data model for empirical researches, this paper tries to construct the framework of the driving mechanism of spatial evolution of COFDI in the United States. The research conclusions are as follows:(1) The unbalance degree of spatial distribution of COFDI in the United States has been decreased, and now presents a trend of diffusion from the coastal areas to the inland parts and the south to the mid-west. Overall, COFDI in the United States has ex-perienced a slow development period since 2000 and now is the period of rapid devel-opment. With the gradual expansion of COFDI in the United States, the overall regional difference has been declining and the space contribution goes to relative equilibrium. Thus it forms four regions:the Pacific coast region which includes California as the core; the Great Lakes region that covers New York, Illinois and Michigan as the center; the Atlantic coast region with North Carolina and South Carolina as the base; the Southwestern region counts on Texas as the radiant point. In all the regions, the spatial evolution process likes a large area consists of multiple locations.(2) There is a cluster of COFDI in the United States though the degree of clus-tering is not significant which indicates the spatial pattern as a "cluster-random distribu-tion-discrete" mode; however, COFDI in local areas having spatial heterogeneity, forming the differentiation of "hot zone" and "cold zone". In details, North Carolina, South Carolina, Texas, California and the Great Lakes areas are the hot spots, while the northwestern of the central plains and the western mountainous areas are cold spots, there is less inter annual variation of this pattern, the significance is not gradually ob- vious.(3) COFDI in the United States is driven by the market and strategic asset, com-bined with a comprehensive analysis of the actual situation of America. And it affects the driving factors of space distribution of COFDI, including market scale factors, in-frastructure factors, labor factors, science and technology innovation factors, tax factors and agglomeration factors. The results indicate that the state of market size, infrastruc-ture, the amount of labor, the number of patent applications, the ratio of research and development spending on GDP have significant positive effects on COFDI while the average annual wage for labor force, the corporate income tax rate and the agglomera-tion would have significant negative effects. Significantly, agglomeration factors do not produce a very good demonstration effect but a negative impact on COFDI which may be due to that COFDI in the United States do not form a large-scale regionalization. Thus the degree of spatial agglomeration is not significant and the agglomeration economy effect still can not play a positive role.The quasi innovations of the study are that a deeper research has been presented of spatial evolution of COFDI in the United States based on the spatial perspective and the theories and empirical aspects. And it constructs the dynamic panel data model through GMM to investigate the driving factors and their impacts of COFDI in the United States. Therefore, the analysis framework of the driving mechanism is tried to be conducted.