Abstract:

Along with the deepening of the policy of reform and openingup and the intensification of economic globalization,the foreign direct investment (FDI) mainly from transnational companies (the principal driving force for the global economy) has given rise to the imbalanced economic increase and regional development of China. In this article,the authors studied the spatial characteristics and the driving force of the FDI location by analyzing the panel data of the FDI for 31 provinces during 1995~2009 with the models of spatial autocorrelation and spatial autoregression.From our results, the FDI for each province exhibits the characteristics of spatial autocorrelation,which becomes stronger with time. In general,the FDI is mainly distributed in economicdeveloped eastern coastlands such as Shanghai,Guangdong and Jiangsu provinces,etc.Nevertheless,the FDI increase rate is biased to the inland provinces with relatively good investment environment in the middle and western parts of China.From the local angle,the FDI tend to scatter from the FDIconcentrated provinces to their ambient ones.The spatial lag regression model also indicates that the spatial dependence is important to the distribution of the FDI.The conventional factors such as locations,〖JP2〗policies,etc.account part of the reason for distribution of the FDI,yet with the influences decreasing with time,while the agglomeration economy,the extent of marketization,etc.display gradually increasing importance