Comparison of China's direct investment in Asia, Europe and America 中国在亚洲、欧洲和美洲的经济和直接投资比较

3.3 Patterns of China's direct investment in Europe and the United States

China has a long history of economic exchanges with the United States and Europe. The trade volume between China and the world's two largest consumer markets increased from US $250 billion in 2013 to more than US $1 trillion in 2016. In addition, China has liberalized the restrictions on foreign direct investment, which has enabled many multinational companies in Europe and the United States to perform strongly in the Chinese market.
In the past decade, China's investment in Europe and the United States has also made rapid development. However, China's investment mainly takes the form of purchasing government bonds and other low-risk bonds.
Due to China's strict capital control and the lack of motivation and ability of enterprises to invest in developed economies, the proportion of China's foreign direct investment to the United States and Europe is still low. According to the official estimate of the Bureau of economic analysis (BEA), the cumulative stock of China's direct investment in the United States reached US $9.5 billion at the end of 2016. □ this value has increased by 700% compared with 2021, but compared with the US FDI stock, China's investment is still small: in 2016, the US FDI stock was US $2.5 trillion, of which China only accounted for 0.4%. O similarly, according to the official statistics of Eurostat, the stock of China's direct investment in Europe in 2015 was US $8.9 billion, less than 0.01% of the EU's total, China accounts for less than 0.3% of the direct investment stock of countries outside Europe. The data of China's direct investment stock in Europe estimated by the Ministry of Commerce of China is slightly larger, reaching US $12.5 billion at the end of 2015. However, according to any standard, the value of China's direct investment in Europe is relatively small.
Although these official data provide us with an important historical perspective, if we need to describe the current trend of China's foreign direct investment and evaluate the driving factors and impact of China's investment, the official data can not help. This is not only because of the serious delay in the publication of official data, but also because of problems in data quality: the widespread use of offshore financial centers and tax havens makes global cross-border investment transactions increasingly complex, and statistical institutions are difficult to accurately track the number of cross-border transactions. This is particularly obvious when counting the amount of China's outward direct investment. Due to legal and practical considerations, Chinese investment usually uses Hong Kong, Singapore and the Caribbean tax havens. In addition, the disclosure of official data may be reduced for reasons such as confidentiality, and some important information is usually lacking, such as the distribution of industries and countries, the ownership distribution of the ultimate beneficiaries, and the operating characteristics of some enterprises, such as assets, profits and the number of jobs created.
Therefore, rhodium group (rhG) has re compiled a database of direct investment of Chinese enterprises in the United States and the European Union. This database adopts a bottom-up approach and covers all M & A and Greenfield investment projects worth more than US $1 million conducted by Chinese enterprises in the United States. Although the data obtained by this method cannot be directly compared with the FDI data obtained by the traditional income and expenditure method, because this method ignores reverse flows, intra company borrowing and other subsequent capital flows, the data obtained by this method makes up for some defects of the traditional method - for example, the previous method cannot take into account the situation of offshore financial centers, It is also convenient for people to conduct detailed real-time analysis on the amount and ownership of China's investment in the United States and Europe. one hundred and eleven