The FDI-spawned technological spillover effects on innovation quality of local enterprises: evidence from industrial firms and the patents in China

Foreign direct investment is a topic of crucial importance for emerging market countries for capital accumulation, innovation and sustainable development. From the perspective of technological innovation, the article explores how ‘desirable’ the FDI is in stimulating domestic innovation. Using industrial firm-level data from 1998 to 2013 combined with patent database from China National Intellectual Property Administration and patent citations from Google Patents, the article captures the significant impact of innovation quality of regional FDI on the innovation quality of local firms with both multi-fixed effects and instrumental variable estimations, which are proved to be reliable with robustness checks. Further, under different entry modes, the article finds that M&A FDI plays a more positive role in spillovers compared with greenfield investment. Finally, the article explores the upstream and downstream linkage benefits and intra-industrial benefit from FDI innovation, which shows that the intra-industrial benefit, or the demonstration effect is prominent. Our article renders a more direct micro evidence of FDI spillovers and sheds light on FDI attracting policies.