Friends with Benefits?: Trends & Implications of Chinese FDI in the US

Daniel Rosen headlines a colloqium hosted by the Research Center for Chinese Politics and Business at Indiana  University. The colloqium’s focus was the impacts, implications, and misconceptions of Chinese foreign direct investment in the United States.

From the event’s press release:

Developments in Chinese direct investment in the United States are poorly understood both by Americans and by Chinese. Even the simple rate of growth in these flows in not recognized. In the US, China’s outward FDI is presumed to be an indication of government intentions, and a sign of strength. On the Chinese side, it is commonly believed that the US has the means and intention to keep Chinese investment out. Elsewhere in the world, it is suspected that Chinese firms will pass the US in preference for friendlier domiciles like Europe. All these assumptions are wrong and controvertible based on good arithmetic. While the quality of analysis on Chinese outbound investment is improving, the state of understanding of the implications remains primitive. A time of new insight and thinking lies just before us.

Speaker: Dan Rosen, Adjunct Associate Professor of International and Public Affairs, Columbia University, Founder and China Practice leader of the Rhodium Group (RHG), and Fellow with the Peterson Institute for International Economics in Washington, DC, and author of Behind the Open Door: Foreign Enterprises in the Chinese Marketplace (1998) and co-author of China’s Energy Evolution: The Consequences of Powering Growth at Home and Abroad (forthcoming 2008, with Trevor Houser), Prospects for a US-Taiwan Free Trade Agreement (2004, with Nicholas Lardy), Roots of Competitiveness: China’s Evolving Agriculture Interests (2004, with Scott Rozelle and Jikun Huang), and APEC and the New Economy (2002, with Catherine L. Mann).