Why is There So Much Demand for Foreign Equity Capital in China? An Institutional and Policy Perspective

Date Published:

Mar 1, 1999

Abstract:

Foreign-invested enterprises (FIEs) are now a significant force in Chinese economy, as measured by their size, performance, and their encroachment on China's most important industries. This paper challenges many of the conventional views on the factors behind this growth of FIEs. The paper offers an institutional and policy perspective explaining the high Chinese demand for foreign equity capital. The basic contention is that FIEs’ advantages over domestic firms exceed the capital and technological advantages in their possession and these extra–ownership–specific advantages arise from the way the Chinese economic institutions are organized. There are two sources of these advantages. One is that foreign firms provide a range of functions that are under–provided by domestic firms due to regulatory and institutional factors. Another source arises from the fact that premium is conferred on FIEs’ form of organization. Certain advantages, by regulations and policies, are granted to FIEs and thus domestic firms have incentives to acquire these advantages by a process of corporate conversion into FIEs. These two sources of extra–ownership–specific advantages create a higher Chinese demand for foreign equity capital than would otherwise be the case under an alternative institutional and policy context.

Notes:

Huang, Yasheng. "Why is There So Much Demand for Foreign Equity Capital in China? An Institutional and Policy Perspective." Working Paper 99–04, Weatherhead Center for International Affairs, Harvard University, March 1999.


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