The Impact of Ofdi Reverse Technology Spillovers on China's Energy Intensity : Analysis of Provincial Panel Data

Reducing energy intensity is crucial for maintaining national energy security and achieving green economic transition. External circulation involving imitating or obtaining the patents, marketing skills and management experience in the host country via the enterprise’s outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) and spilling them back to the home country, creates good external conditions for improving the home country’s energy utilization efficiency. Given this, we pioneer the measurement of OFDI reverse technology spillovers using the data of the enterprise’s overseas investment and host countries, innovatively construct the interaction term of money supply fluctuations and modern port opening history as an instrumental variable and adopt the two-stage least squares (2SLS) method to obtain a consistent estimate of the inhibitory effect on energy intensity at the provincial level. The main findings show that reverse technology spillovers brought by OFDI significantly reduce energy intensity. After recalculating the dependent variable and the core explanatory variable, shortening the time window, reducing the sample size, and making control variables lagging by one period, the result technology spillovers have an inhibition effect on domestic energy intensity is robust. Furthermore, technology spillovers obtained from overseas investment activities in areas along BRI have a more obvious effect. In addition, enterprises in technology-intensive and non-resource-intensive industries are more conducive to getting RTS for reducing provincial energy intensity