Is China taking away foreign direct investment from other Asian economies?: An analysis of Japanese, US and Korean FDI

This paper applies the dynamic panel model to investigate whether China is crowding- out FDI from other Asian economies. In addition to an analysis of aggregate FDI like prior studies, an investigation is carried out for FDI from three major investors in the region: Japan, the United States and Korea. It order to deal with possible problems of serial correlation and simultaneous causality bias, refined estimation techniques; namely, Arellano Bond and Instrumental Variable estimations were undertaken. We found that the study on aggregate FDI did not produce any evidence on so called crowding- out of FDI by China, which is consistent with other studies. In FDI source country specific analysis, we did not find any “China effect” on Japanese and Korean FDI. However, the analysis of US FDI found that FDI in China had positive impact on FDI to other Asian economies. These findings led us to conclude that the rise of China could be seen as an opportunity rather than threat in attracting FDI for other Asian economies in the region.