对外援助促进了对外直接投资吗?——基于国家风险视角

Abstract

Foreign aid and OFDI are important tools for China to build a "dual circulation" development and high-level opening-up strategies. Country risk is the primary challenge for Chinese enterprises to "go global" in recent years, which directly threatens investment security and efficiency. Based on the dataset of China's foreign aid and OFDI from 2000 to 2018, this paper constructs the theoretical models to reveal the relationship between foreign aid, OFDI and country risk, explore the risk mitigation mechanism of foreign aid for OFDI and obtain conclusions as follows. Firstly, China's foreign aid can promote the OFDI inflow of Chinese enterprises to the recipient countries. For every 1% increase in China's aid, the foreign direct investment flowing into the recipient countries will increase by 0.1161%. Secondly, China's foreign aid can significantly reduce the national risks of recipient countries and play a role in risk mitigation, especially the economic risk and financial risk, and then stabilize and promote the inflow of Chinese enterprises' OFDI. Thirdly, the effect of foreign aid on OFDI is heterogeneous, aid based on commercial purposes can promote OFDI better than on developmental purposes, and significantly inhibit country risk. Compared to the direct provision of material and human assistance, aid in the form of technology and capital can better promote the capacity building and governance improvement of donor countries, thus exerting the positive impact of risk mitigation. Fourthly, the risk mitigation effect of foreign aid has obvious "non-altruism" and "crowding out effect". In particular, foreign aid between China and Japan has obvious competition in the field of foreign direct investment.