Sustainability | Free Full-Text | The Moderating Role of Host Investment Environments on the Relationship between Enterprises’ OFDI and Green Innovation: Evidence from China
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In response to the global climate problem, countries around the world are accelerating the formation of the global climate governance pattern and building the global environmental and climate governance system. The Paris Agreement specifies the “hard targets” of environmental protection, ensuring sustainable development, and making unified arrangements for global action against climate change. China has proposed the carbon peaking and carbon neutrality goals of “reaching the peak of carbon by 2030” and “achieving carbon neutrality by 2060” to deal with the climate problem.
Since the reform and opening up, China’s policy of opening up to the outside world has undergone a change from “bringing in” to “going out”, and the total amount of foreign direct investment has been increasing steadily. In 2020, China’s outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) flow reached $153.71 billion, surpassing the United States for the first time and ranking first in the world. OFDI has become an efficient economic driver in China’s economic growth. By the end of 2020, China had 28,000 domestic investors with 45,000 OFDI enterprises in 189 countries (regions) around the world.
Compared with the existing studies, there are several contributions of our study to the literature. First, this paper makes an in-depth study of OFDI, which is one method of internationalization and enriches the economic consequences related to corporations’ OFDI from the perspective of green innovation. Previous studies mainly based on the macro level, such as the national or regional level, to explore the influencing factors of OFDI [17,18,19] and its economic consequences related to technological innovation and green performance [20,21,22]. Distinctly, we focus on the micro firm level and examine the effect of enterprises’ OFDI on green innovation. On the one hand, it is of great practical significance to explore the green innovation effect of OFDI for improving the global environmental governance system. On the other hand, green innovation could serve as an emerging strategic CSR behavior and provide a new theoretical logic to explain the behavioral decisions of enterprises’ OFDI.
The rest of the paper is organized as follows: The second part presents a review of the literature; the third part is the theoretical analysis and hypothesis; the fourth part is the research design; the fifth part is the empirical results and analysis; the sixth part is the further analysis; and finally, the last part is the discussion and implications.