Assessing the impact of China's WTO accession on investment

After a boom in foreign direct investment (FDI) in China in the early 1990s, FDI slowed in the late 1990s. More recently, with China's accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) a reality, FDI has once again picked up. This paper explores the linkage between WTO accession and investment in China. We find that investment and capital stocks increase substantially. Moreover, foreign ownership of Chinese assets doubles by 2020. Central to this increase is the expected catch-up in the productivity of the services sectors driven by reforms. These estimates are far larger than those predicted by earlier studies, which ignored the reforms affecting Chinese services sectors, and abstracted from international capital mobility.