Research On The Location Distributionof China’s OFDI To RCEP Member States From The Perspective Of Institutional Distance

From the reform and opening up to the "going out" strategy and the "the Belt and Road" initiative,China’s foreign direct investment has gradually accelerated,forming a diversified investment pattern in spatial distribution,industrial structure,investment types and other aspects.Especially since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001,both the scale of foreign direct investment and the scale of foreign direct investment in China have increased rapidly.However,since 2018,the global economic growth has continued to be sluggish,unilateralism,trade protectionism and other phenomena have become increasingly obvious,and the development of regional economic integration has been hampered by the impact of the epidemic.In this context,the process of economic cooperation in the Asia-Pacific region has been accelerating.The signing of the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement(RCEP)has enabled the establishment of the world’s largest free trade zone,created a good institutional environment among member countries,changed the institutional distance between countries,and is an important milestone in the construction of Asia-Pacific economic integration.This paper takes the RCEP member countries as the research object and the institutional distance as the starting point to explore the new changes and new characteristics of the location distribution of China’s foreign direct investment(OFDI)under the influence of RCEP,and gives reasonable suggestions.The first chapter first introduces the background and significance of China’s research on the location of OFDI in RCEP countries,and uses the literature analysis method to study the motivation of investment location selection,especially the institutional distance factor,while understanding the impact of RCEP on regional economic integration and China’s OFDI.The second chapter describes the concept of institutional distance in detail,sorts out the measurement methods of institutional distance by previous scholars,selects the global governance index(WGI)and economic freedom index(EFI)to measure the political and economic institutional distance,and analyzes the impact mechanism of political institutional distance and economic institutional distance on the location distribution of OFDI in China,and puts forward corresponding assumptions.The third chapter studies the current situation of China’s investment flows and stocks in RCEP countries,and finds that there are three regional distribution characteristics: diversification and specialization of the investment industry,the main flow of investment to ASEAN and the differentiation of investment entities.It points out that the overall proportion of China’s investment in RCEP countries is still low,the difference between different countries is huge,and the investment industry level is low,and the management ability of investment entities is weak.On this basis,the fourth chapter carries out empirical analysis.First,it divides developed countries and developing countries into two groups to sort out the unilateral and bilateral investment between China and the RCEP member countries.Secondly,based on the panel data of China’s outward direct investment in the RCEP countries from 2003 to 2021,it uses the investment gravity model,the panel data and the fixed effect model to conduct econometric regression,and carries out the heterogeneity test of two groups of countries and molecular dimensions.The last chapter draws conclusions and gives reasonable suggestions at the government and enterprise levels.In the past,scholars’ research on trade and investment agreements mostly started from bilateral investment agreements(BITs),and this study expanded to multilateral trade and investment agreements,closely following the current entry into force of RCEP and domestic and foreign economic realities,to carry out systematic research on the location distribution of direct investment in RCEP member countries;At the same time,the institutional distance is divided into three levels: political institutional distance,macroeconomic institutional distance and microeconomic institutional distance,and their impact on OFDI is studied respectively: to tome extends,political institutional distance has a blocking effect,while macroeconomic institutional distance and microeconomic institutional distance have significant promoting effects.The implementation of RCEP weakens the negative impact of institutional distance,amplifies the positive effect,and has a huge role in promoting and promoting investment activities in China’s outward investments to RCEP countries.