Going global : determinants of Chinese outward foreign direct investment in the agri-food industry

Growing investment from developing and transition economies flows to global agri-food industry, among which Chinese outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) in the agri-food industry attracted much more global attention in recent years. In this paper, the authors documented the evolution of Chinese OFDI in the agri-food industry from 1950s. Besides, conditional logit model is mainly used to econometrically analyze how the host country characteristics affect Chinese firms country choices on investing in foreign agri-food industry based on the panel data between 2006 and 2015. Both the conditional logit result and the robustness check (negative binomial result) show that Chinese OFDI in the agri-food industry has both motivations of agricultural resources seeking and market seeking. The result of sub agri-food industries indicates that market seeking motivation is distinct in the agriproduct processing and food manufacturing industries. Chinese OFDI flowing to these two industries are attracted by both GDP and population growth rate. In addition, lack of sufficient food is also an attraction to Chinese OFDI to flow into target country s food manufacturing industry. Acknowledgement : The authors would like to thank research assistant Yue Jin, Suxian Ma, Sai Du for their helpful support. The authors gratefully acknowledge the support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (NNSFC-71273233, 71333011) and the Major Program of the Key Research Institute of Chinese Ministry of Education (No. 15JJD790032).