对非援助与中国企业对外直接投资

Abstract

In recent years, the rapid development of China's aid to Africa causes controversy at home and abroad, such as "charity" and "neocolonialism". This paper seeks to refute these claims by clarifying the relationship and mechanism between China's aid to Africa and Chinese enterprises' direct investment. By adding foreign aid to government budget with respect to improving governance capacity and introducing governance to production function, this paper builds a theoretical model that fits the Chinese scenario. Based on the Recorded List of Overseas Investment Enterprises provided by China's Ministry of Commerce, Global Chinese Official Finance Dataset by AidData and Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) between 2000 and 2014, this paper investigates whether China's aid to Africa could promote outward FDI of Chinese enterprises. The baseline regressions show that China's aid to Africa can promote outward FDI of Chinese enterprises by improving governance capacity, such as the quality of supervision and the level of rule of law. Moreover, the results of heterogeneity tests show that this positive impact is significant regarding to aid with development intent, investments of non-central enterprises, low-income and lower-middle-income economies in Africa. Aimed at enhancing recipient countries' capacity for independent and sustainable development, China's aid to Africa helps to improve socio-economic performance and investment environment of recipient countries, which leads to promote Chinese enterprises' outward FDI in Africa. These results show that China's aid to Africa has effectively promoted the process of building an even closer China-Africa community with a shared future. These results are also conducive to a deeper understanding of the social effects and economic effects of China's aid to Africa and the formulation of China's future foreign aid and investment policies.