| Since the first China Railway Express(CRE)has been opened in 2011,CRE have been in operation for eleven years.The "one belt and one road" initiative has promoted the rapid development of CRE.In the eleven years,the scale of the trains has been expanding continuously,and the operation has gradually normalized,and the types of goods transported are also increasing.The CRE is a major transportation channel jointly promoted by many domestic cities,departments and countries along the line.It is an upgrade of the open environment for domestic urban economic and trade cooperation.The opening of the train has opened up trade channels between China and European countries,promoted economic and trade exchanges between China and Europe,and greatly facilitated the foreign trade of the starting city.In order to explore whether the opening of CRE affects China’s foreign direct investment,if there is a significant impact,and whether the characteristics of the impact have heterogeneity at the level of enterprises,cities and host countries,this paper constructs a multi-stage difference-in-differences(DID)model,selects the foreign direct investment data of China’s starting cities from 2005 to 2020 as the analysis sample,and collects and analyzes the data from the official website of China Railway Container Company,CRE transportation network and regional statistical yearbooks This paper collates the information of the first opening of CRE in cities,and uses the multi-stage difference-in-differences(DID)model to regress the data.The results show that compared with the cities without CRE,the increase of foreign direct investment of cities with CRE is more significant,indicating that the opening of CRE promotes the foreign direct investment of starting cities.In order to make the regression results more robust,this paper conducted a placebo test and used the propensity score matching(PSM)method to match the treatment group and the control group,and the results are still significant.On this basis,this paper also uses the heterogeneous did model to study whether there is heterogeneity in the investment effect of CRE from five perspectives:whether the investment type is green investment,the source attraction area where the city is located,whether the city is a node city,the income level of the investment host country and the location of the investment host country.It is found that the opening of CRE plays a stronger role in promoting cross-border M&A.At the host country level,the opening of CRE has promoted OFDI for enterprises,more significantly for high-income and low-income countries,and more significantly for the Americas and Europe in terms of location distribution.In order to explore the mechanism of CRE promoting foreign direct investment in starting cities,this paper uses the intermediary effect model,and successively takes the urban trade openness,investment risk and investment efficiency as the intermediary variables of CRE promoting foreign direct investment in starting cities.It is verified that CRE can improve the foreign direct investment of starting cities in China by reducing enterprise transportation costs,reducing financing constraints,promoting investment efficiency,improving the openness of urban foreign trade and reducing investment risks.Finally,according to the research conclusions,this paper puts forward suggestions from the perspective of node cities and CRE:node cities continue to play the role of cargo hub,coordinate with multiple departments to improve the high-quality development of trains,prevent the epidemic and the risks of countries along the line,and create a solid cooperation platform for enterprises to "go global". |
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