부산대학교 도서관

Along with the rapid development of economic globalization and integration of regional economy, the capital movement between countries has become more and more frequent. Especially due to the increase in foreign investments, the development of world economy has been largely quickened. The multinational enterprises dominated by foreign direct investment have not only promoted the nation’s economic development, but also have played a significant part in the development process of global economy. However, as the activities of overseas direct investment of cross-national companies have been conducted under the foreign environment, which is quite different from our domestic environment, so, they need to confront with various difficulties caused by diverse economic, political, social and cultural factors. While among these influencing factors, cultural difference has both acted a crucial role in the process of enterprise internationalization and has posed an important effect on overseas direct investment of companies. Nowadays, China together with USA and UK has become one of the three countries which can attract the most foreign investments in the world. After joining WTO in 2001, especially in 2002, China has first surpassed America to be the most attractive nation for foreign investors. In 2014, the foreign investments in China have reached 129 billion dollars, which is the second time after 2002 for China to appeal to a larger amount of foreign investments than that in USA. There are a lot of empirical researches about the influences of cultural differences on overseas investment of transnational enterprises and their market entry mode, but the studies on the effects of cultural differences on their direct investment in China are still insufficient. Besides, even among such a small number of studies, almost all the researchers have taken advantage of Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory to realize the analysis on therelationship between cultural differences and foreign investments. By utilizing the data of 54 investment countries which have conducted direct investments in China for 13 years from 2002 to 2014, with the help of Hofstede's cultural dimensions theory, and by adding the variables of language variation and religious difference for the test of psychological distance to build a gravity model, this paper has not only investigated the influences of cultural differences on the direct investment in China by multinational enterprises, but also has explored the correlation between the two aspects.