FDI Backward Spillovers in China: What a Meta-Analysis Tells Us?

Drawing on a unique dataset of 694 estimates from 24 studies on foreign direct investment backward spillovers in China, this paper quantitatively analyzes spillover effects corrected for publication bias and misspecification, and account for the heterogeneity in existing empirical results using meta-regression analysis. We find that (1) the backward spillover effect corrected for publication bias and misspecification in China is quite remarkable and economically significant; (2) the backward spillover effects vary across heterogeneous firms largely. The meta-analysis also examines various study characteristics that explains the study-to-study heterogeneity of the reported spillover estimates.