FDI Technology Spillover Is Affected By The Regional Absorptive Capacity And The Threshold Effect Analysis Of Alternative Indicators

Technology spillover through FDI has become an important channel for developing countries to catch up with and surpass developed countries.China is also expanding the scale of foreign investment and optimizing the structure of foreign-funded enterprises.In the actual research,FDI technology spillover in China shows obvious regional differences,which is closely related to the different absorptive capacity of different regions.In this paper,the relevant research methods of academia are used to represent FDI Spillover with TFP as the dependent variable.Taking the inter provincial data of China from 2004 to 2017 as a sample(and considering the lack of data in Tibet,we delete this province).In this paper,SFA method is used to divide TFP into change rate of production efficiency,technological progress rate and scale efficiency,and then TFP is calculated.In terms of investment,considering the heterogeneity of human capital level in different regions,this paper uses the per capita education years as the proxy variable of labor skills,then homogenizes the labor force in each province,and uses the perpetual inventory method to calculate the capital stock of each province,so as to obtain more representative total factor productivity.In order to analyze the absorptive capacity of each region,based on the vast literature,this paper finally selects five representative factors: economic development,human capital,infrastructure construction,the level of openness and the level of marketization.In terms of data,we establish panel data for 2004-2017,including 30 provinces,cities and autonomous regions in China(Tibet region was deleted due to insufficient data).And for model selection,this paper assumes that the role of absorptive capacity factor in different regions is nonlinear,but there is a certain threshold.Before and after the threshold,the influence coefficients of each variable on the absorptive capacity of different regions are different.Therefore,we choose Hansen threshold panel regression method to study the absorptive capacity of FDI technology spillover in different regions and determine the location of each region in the threshold.As for specific calculation,we take total factor productivity as dependent variable.Based on the economic endogenous growth theory,we choose R&D internal expenditure and per capita capital stock as control variables.Besides,we take FDI inflow as core variable,and choose economic development level,human capital level,infrastructure construction level,openness and marketization level as threshold variables.At first,we test the existence of threshold effect,then calculate the specific threshold and observe its confidence interval.Through the analysis of various elements,combined with China's development planning and regional policy,we can provide differentiated suggestions for the further development of each region.The results show that these five representative factors have significant threshold effects,among which economic development has two thresholds,while human capital,infrastructure construction,the degree of openness and the level of marketization have single threshold.As of 2017,from the perspective of China's economic development level,all provinces,cities and autonomous regions(except Tibet)have entered the second threshold of economic development level,and the impact of economic development on the improvement of regional absorption capacity has declined,but it is still positive;also,we find that all provinces have also crossed the threshold of human capital.The continuous improvement of labor quality is a long-term and slow process for the improvement of absorption capacity;as for infrastructure construction,by 2017,most provinces have crossed the threshold,but there are still areas such as Inner Mongolia,Heilongjiang and Gansu that have not crossed the threshold,which has a great impact on the regional absorption capacity,so it is urgent for these regions to strengthen the investment in infrastructure construction;From the observation of inter provincial data,provinces show great differences in this variable.However,from the provincial data,from 2004 to 2017,there was no significant change in this data.Specifically,in 2004,10 eastern coastal provinces have crossed the threshold value.By 2017,few new provinces had joined.In addition,20 provinces have not yet reached the threshold.Therefore,we need to adhere to the policy of opening to the outside world,especially to actively respond to the strategy of "one belt and one way",and to strengthen the opening up of the inland areas of the central and western regions.Finally,the degree of marketization affects FDI technology.Spillover the external environment,there are still some provinces have not crossed the threshold,need to further optimize the market environment.Finally,this paper innovatively found a new threshold value,and demonstrated that blindly improving regional absorption capacity will not lead to the rapid growth of FDI spillover.When the threshold value is crossed,the impact of specific indicators of absorption capacity on FDI spillover will decline,which is in line with the reality.In the specific absorptive capacity indicators,we can find that by 2017,some regions in China are still in the range where absorptive capacity has a significant impact on FDI spillovers.At this time,the government can guide them to quickly improve FDI spillovers in the short term and promote regional development;while some regions have crossed the threshold value,at this time,too much investment in specific indicator has limited impact on FDI spillovers.