国际经济与贸易学院知识库

      As China's economy enters a new normal development stage, the focus of economic development shifts from the pursuit of speed to the pursuit of quality, the previous rough development model is difficult to maintain, the demographic dividend, resource advantages and reform dividend gradually recede, with talent, innovation as the core of the development model is unique. As the ballast of the economy, how to break through the technical "low-end lock" problem of the manufacturing industry to achieve the transformation and upgrading has become an urgent issue for all sectors of society in recent years. In 2013, the Chinese government put forward the "One Belt and One Road" initiative, aiming to take this opportunity to further push up the level of China's opening up to the whole world, to promote enterprises to go abroad in exchange for resources and technology, to achieve their own technology and productivity level upgrade. Can the "One Belt and One Road" initiative boost the transformation and upgrading of China's manufacturing enterprises? An in-depth examination of this issue can, to a certain extent, reveal the intrinsic mechanism and effect between China's manufacturing enterprises' participation in investment along the "One Belt and One Road" and their own transformation and upgrading.

          Based on the background of the in-depth implementation of the initiative, this paper takes listed manufacturing enterprises participating in OFDI under the initiative as the research object, firstly, it compares and analyzes the development status of China's overall OFDI and the transformation and upgrading of manufacturing enterprises, and summarizes the existing characteristics and difficulties; then, it combines a series of International investment and industrial upgrading theories, try to explore the influence mechanism and path of OFDI on enterprise transformation and upgrading. Finally, using the panel data of 1,106 listed manufacturing enterprises during 2010-2020, we employ a double difference model to empirically test the impact of OFDI on the transformation and upgrading level of enterprises along the "One Belt and One Road", the total factor productivity level. The study finds that since the beginning of the "One Belt and One Road" period, the impact of OFDI on the transformation and upgrading level of enterprises, i.e., total factor productivity, has been significant. The study finds that since the introduction of the "One Belt One Road" initiative, with the expansion of investment in countries along the route, the innovation capacity of Chinese enterprises has been enhanced, which positively contributes to the transformation and upgrading level of enterprises as characterized by total factor productivity. At the same time, the sub-sample test finds that the effect of the initiative on the upgrading level of enterprises is affected by the ownership and technology endowment of enterprises, i.e., the initiative promotes the transformation and upgrading of non-state manufacturing enterprises to a greater extent than that of state-owned enterprises, and has the greatest effect on the upgrading of low- and medium-tech manufacturing industries. Based on the findings of the study, this paper argues that all parties concerned should take advantage of the initiative to encourage state-owned enterprises to "open up the mountains and open up the roads", take the initiative to build a technology cooperation platform to establish a risk warning system, and steadily promote manufacturing enterprises "Go abroad", improve the level of enterprise value chain, and maintain the vitality of enterprise development.