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 a green economic transition. Outer circulation creates good external conditions for improving the home country's energy utiliza-tion efficiency. Given this, we pioneer the measurement of reverse technology spillovers (RTS) using the data of the domestic enterprise's overseas investment, innovatively construct an instrumental variable involving money supply fluctuations and the modern history of port opening, and adopt the two-stage least squares (2SLS) method to obtain a consistent estimate of the effect on energy intensity at the provincial level. The main findings show that RTS significantly reduces energy intensity, which remains robust after recalculating the dependent variable and the core explanatory variable, shortening the time window, and reducing the sample size. Furthermore, the decline in energy intensity benefits more from technology spillovers obtained by overseas investment activities in areas along the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) and technology-intensive and non-resource-intensive industries.