Research On The Impact Of Digital Trade Rules On China’s OFDI To Countries Along The "The Belt And Road"

With the continuous maturity and perfection of digital technology,the influence of digital economy in countries around the world is deepening.To this end,countries are actively exploring digital trade rules to ensure the order of their participation in international economic activities.Since the "the belt and road initiative" was put forward,international cooperation and exchanges have been further deepened.More and more China enterprises have chosen foreign direct investment,now they have reached a certain scale,and their investment exchanges with countries along the "the belt and road initiative" have also been deepened.Under the influence of digital trade rules,rules such as orderly data flow,electronic authentication clauses,nondiscrimination and restricted data protection have reduced the costs and barriers for enterprises to participate in international activities,enhanced the confidence and security of Chinese foreign-invested enterprises,and promoted the implementation of other rules in the "the belt and road initiative" to promote the continuous development of investment creation effects.With the improvement of digital trade rules and the continuous implementation of the "the belt and road initiative",it is of theoretical and practical significance to study the influence of digital trade rules on OFDI in countries along the "the belt and road initiative".In this paper,firstly,the development of digital trade rules,the mainstream system and the characteristics of specific rules are studied,and then the investment status of China in countries along the "the belt and road initiative" is analyzed from three parts: investment scale,investment industry and investment location.After analyzing the mechanism of the influence of digital trade rules on China’s investment and putting forward the hypothesis,this paper takes 41 host countries along the "the belt and road initiative" as the research object,and empirically analyzes the influence of digital trade rules on China’s direct investment in countries along the "the belt and road initiative".In the empirical part,this paper uses PSM-multi-period DID model to study the policy effect of digital trade rules.19 host countries that have signed digital trade rules with China are selected as the experimental group,and 22 countries that have not signed digital trade rules are selected as the control group.The data of ten years from2011 to 2020 are selected for research.Firstly,the data were matched by propensity score after the balance test to reduce the endogeneity,and then the fixed effect regression of each variable was carried out.It was found that the digital trade rules significantly promoted the level of China’s direct investment in countries along the "the belt and road initiative",and the robustness of the model was proved in changing the policy time,changing the sample of the experimental group and shrinking the tail test.Then,in the process of testing the heterogeneity of the host country,it is found that digital trade rules promote the OFDI level of high-income countries,non-Islamic countries and countries with higher economic freedom along the "the belt and road initiative".Finally,the construction of digital infrastructure in 41 host countries is estimated by principal component analysis,and it is verified that digital infrastructure has a positive regulatory effect on the promotion of China’s direct investment in countries along the "the belt and road initiative" by digital trade rules.The research of this paper conforms to the new situation of international economic development,and provides policy suggestions for China to formulate more perfect digital trade rules and Chinese enterprises to further participate in international investment activities,also provides reference for deepening the international economic cooperation and exchange of the "the belt and road initiative".