Summary:
The rapid development of China's economy since its reform and opening up has also brought many deep-seated structural problems. One such problem is overcapacity, which seriously reduces the efficiency of economic operation and poses a challenge to the long-term sustainable development of China's economy. This paper takes the large-scale foreign capital liberalization triggered by the revision of the Catalogue for the Guidance of Foreign Investment Industries by the Chinese government in 2002 as a quasi-natural experiment and uses a difference in differences (DID) method to explore the impact of foreign investment on the capacity utilization rate of domestic enterprises. The main finding of this paper is that foreign capital opening improves the capacity utilization rate of domestic enterprises in the same industry. The mechanism test shows that production efficiency, export expansion, and foreign direct investment are important channels through which foreign capital opening affects domestic enterprises' capacity utilization rate. A heterogeneity analysis shows that foreign capital opening has a greater effect on the capacity utilization rate of private enterprises, general trade enterprises, enterprises with strong absorptive capacity, and enterprises in coastal areas, and that the regional institutional environment enhances the capacity utilization rate improvement effect of foreign capital opening. This paper also examines the relationship between foreign capital opening and the capacity utilization rate from the perspective of upstream and downstream forward and backward correlation and finds that in addition to the horizontal spillover effect of foreign investment in the industry, domestic enterprises also obtain positive forward flow from foreign investment in upstream and downstream industries. The effect of backward correlation and backward correlation has significantly improved its own capacity utilization rate. Finally, this paper examines the impact of the foreign investment opening policy on the overall capacity utilization rate of the manufacturing industry, and finds that foreign investment opening has significantly promoted the growth of the overall manufacturing capacity utilization rate through resource reallocation channels. Foreign investment opening also promotes the elimination of enterprises with backward production capacity, thereby improving the efficiency of resource reallocation and promoting the overall capacity utilization rate of the manufacturing industry. This paper makes four contributions to the literature. First, from a research perspective, this paper not only examines the impact of FDI industry spillovers on the capacity utilization rate of domestic enterprises, but also analyzes it from the perspective of correlated industries, which makes up for the sin gle perspective from which the capacity utilization effect of foreign investment opening has been studied, thus enabling a more comprehensive evaluation of the impact of foreign investment opening on the manufacturing capacity utilization rate. Second, in terms of identification strategy, this paper takes the large-scale foreign capital liberalization caused by the revision of the Chinese government's 2002 Catalogue of Industries for Guiding Foreign Investment as a quasi-natural experiment and uses a DID method to conduct empirical research, which helps overcome the endogeneity of the model in the literature and allows more reliable research conclusions to be obtained. Third, this paper deeply examines the mechanism through which foreign capital opening affects the capacity utilization rate of domestic enterprises from multiple dimensions, allowing a deep understan ding of the internal relationship between foreign capital opening and the capacity utilization rate. Finally, this paper studies the impact of foreign investment opening policies on the overall capacity utilization rate of the manufacturing industry at the industry level and finds that foreign investment opening has significantly promoted the growth of the overall manufacturing capacity utilization rate through resource reallocation channels. Foreign investment opening promotes both the reallocation of market share from surviving companies with backward production capacity to companies with relatively advantageous production capacity and the elimination of backward production capacity companies, thereby improving the efficiency of resource reallocation and promoting the overall production capacity utilization rate of the manufacturing industry. This novel discovery has important policy implications for helping solve China's overcapacity dilemma from the perspective of foreign policy adjustment.
毛其淋, 杨晓冬. 破解中国制造业产能过剩的新路径:外资开放政策的视角[J]. 金融研究, 2022, 505(7): 38-56.
MAO Qilin, YANG Xiaodong. A New Way to Solve China's Manufacturing Overcapacity: An Empirical Study Based on the Perspective of Foreign Investment Opening Policy. Journal of Financial Research, 2022, 505(7): 38-56.
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