外国直接投资在中国的分布.docVIP

The Distribution of Foreign Direct Investment in China Harry G. Broadman and Xiaolun Sun Labour cost. Foreign investors generally aim to take advantage of host countries’ cheaper factor inputs (relative to their home countries), and the cost of labour is often considered important in this regard. In other words, foreign investors display sensitivity to inter-country variations in labour costs in making their location decisions. However, the sensitivity of FDI location decisions to intra-country labour cost differentials is unlikely to be as pronounced. Indeed, even though the decision to invest in China is no doubt heavily influenced by the country’s prevailing low wage rate, once the choice is made to locate an investment in China, finding the cheapest possible labour within China may not be an important consideration as wage differentials may not be significant. In fact, it is likely to be the case that observed wage rates(including bonuses and in- kind benefits) do not vary as much between regions within China as within other countries because of China’s legacy of central planning, which has tended to homogenize wage rates. Thus, while the provinces with higher labour costs can be expected to compete less favourably in their efforts to attract foreign investment, our expectation is that this variable is not likely to yield a strong negative relationship with provincial FDI accumulation. The measure of labour cost we use is the average annual provincial wage to staff and worker in 1992. Human capital. A host region’s labour supply influences foreign investors’ location decisions not only in terms of input costs, but also through the quality of the skills of the labour force棗especially if the price mechanism is repressed, as is the case in Chinak’s labour markets. All other things being equal, locales with highly skilled workers棗most easily measured by education levels棗would be expected to compete more favourably than others in their FDI attractiveness. tIn this s