Hit or benefit: 2016 Foreign Investment Environment Assessment
Thursday, 2 February 2017It was a chilly morning in January, one of my friends in China Daily called me from her office, seeking support to arrange an interview to Chongqing-based foreign company. According to my friend, the national English newspaper was trying to find positive evidence of local government's invisible hand in supporting FDI to this region, and the bigger background was Chongqing's shining record over the past several years. According to the data shared by China Daily Headquarter prior the interview, the import/ export amount of Chongqing has increased 16 times in the past 5 years, reaching 95.5 billion USD, and the FDI has topped over 10 billion USD for 4 consecutive years, ranking No.1 in Middle and West China.
Speaking of the proposed interview which focused on "benefit" the investors received, I understood that the state media expected a kind of endorsement for local investment environment. However, apart from those government incentives for boosting local economy, my initial thought after the telephone call also included the negative experience recently encountered by some European companies when they tried to remit dividends abroad. We knew the European Chamber of Commerce had the audacity record of voicing out those difficulties in China, while in order to facilitate the interview and get the full picture of the feedback from foreign investors, this time I did make several phone calls to our member companies in British commercial networks. The responses vary in different sectors and members always have different opinions from their individual experience and that's part of the reason usually we don't take explicit stance in major debates (to avoid conflict of members' interests).
In the end, to help the China Daily better draft the article, I invited the Head of China Daily Chongqing Team to the press conference of 2016 Investment Environment Assessment Report (重庆市外商投资环境测评报告), which was produced by Chongqing Association for Enterprises with Foreign Investment (重庆市外商投资企业协会) and Ernst & Young. The focus of this report perfectly matches the interview, and the content are well written by professional team with authentic official sources. According to the report, the Municipal Committee of Commerce conducted annual audit for 1615 foreign enterprises in Chongqing, among them 992 are WFOE and 583 are joint ventures. The Association sent out about 1200 questionnaires and received 532 valid answered copies. Please note that it was the first time in Chongqing a semi-government organisation published such a research on foreign investment environment, which used to be done by foreign chambers of commerce in China over the years.
I'm not going to copy and paste the data/ executive summary from the report, here I attached a Chinese version of the full report for stakeholders who might be interested in detailed research. The English version of this report is not available yet and will be published soon, feel free to contact the Association or let me know regarding future update. We are in the year of 2017 now, I can't predict the economic outlook, but I do believe that sometimes prosperity is a self-realised prophecy.
Labels: chongqing, investment
Posted by Guoyu @ 21:44,
