Institutional Distance, Investment Motivation and OFDI Location—Taking the Countries along the “Belt and Road” as an Example

摘要

This paper selects 2008-2017 years of relevant investment data and uses the expanded gravity model to conduct an empirical analysis to explore the moderating effect of China’s investment motivation and institutional distance on the countries with different levels of development along the “Belt and Road”. The main innovation of this paper is to classify the countries in different economic development stages along the “Belt and Road” countries. On the basis of investment motives, this paper discusses how institutional distance is used as a regulatory variable to affect the investment of different motives. The results show that small distance between the host country and China’s normative system promotes the expansion of China’s investment scale. The distance between regulatory regimes has a reverse regulatory effect on investment driven by market size. For the middle and high income countries, the negative impact of regulatory distance on labor force and technology factor-seeking investment is particularly significant, while for low-income countries, regulatory distance has a very significant positive regulatory effect on natural resource-seeking investment. Finally, this paper provides targeted recommendations based on the conclusions to help investors reduce risk. Investors should make good use of the effect of institutional distance according to their own motives in order to reduce investment costs and risks. Relevant departments need to further improve the domestic regulatory environment and promote the development of OFDI in the future.