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 accounts for the heterogeneity in existing empirical results using meta-regression analysis. Robust to various methods and specifications, the results show that this backward spillover effect corrected for publication bias and misspecification is remarkable and economically significant. We also derive backward spillover estimates for hypothetical combinations of study characteristics and find the synthetic spillover estimates vary across heterogeneous firms. The meta-analysis also examines various study characteristics that explain the heterogeneity across studies of the reported spillover estimates.