关键词: 政治能力, 市场能力, 双元能力, 交互效应, 对外投资绩效

Abstract: With the increasing protectionism in the Western developed countries, China and the developing countries along the Belt and Road have increasingly shown a wide scope for cooperation and demand due to their economic complementarities and interconnected interests, and Chinese enterprises have been increasing their outbound investment in the developing countries along the Belt and Road. However, developing countries along the Belt and Road are characterised by high political risks. In these high political risk host countries, Chinese enterprises face both “political constraints” and “market constraints”. There is a lack of theoretical insight and empirical evidence on how firms can address both “political” and “market” challenges to improve investment performance.
This paper introduces the dual capability of “politics and market” as a research sample, taking Chinese listed companies that entered the “Belt and Road” developing countries with high political risk from 2008 to 2014. The study examines the impact of the interaction between the political ability to enter the “political market” and the market ability to enter the “product market” on investment performance, reveals the combination of capabilities that affects the investment performance of enterprises, and constructs a framework of factors that affect the investment returns of multinational enterprises in high political risk host countries. The data is mainly collected from annual reports of listed companies, Guo-Tai-An Data Centre (CSMAR) and Wind Information Financial Terminal.
Relying on developing country contexts and using the outward investment of Chinese firms as empirical evidence, this paper finds that: (1)The results of benchmark regressions show that political capabilities, market capabilities (technology dimension) and their interactions all enhance firms' outbound investment performance; (2)Heterogeneity analysis shows that state-owned firms and firms with high organizational redundancy rely more on nurturing and developing dual capabilities to achieve the desired investment performance than non-state-owned firms and firms with low organizational redundancy. The conclusions suggest that success in the “political market” is as important as success in the “product market”, and that there are synergies between the success of firms in both markets. The results still hold through robustness tests of instrumental variables, joint cubic equation estimation, controlling for the impact of financial crises and replacing political competence measures.
This study has implications for Chinese firms' OFDI decisions and operations: (1)In order to obtain the desired investment performance, Chinese firms should consider whether they have the political capabilities to handle the political market risks in the host country; (2)Chinese firms involved in OFDI should also build and develop market capabilities to cope with the product market challenges in the host country; (3)In the face of the constraints and challenges of the dual markets in the high political risk host country, Chinese enterprises need to consciously apply the dual path of “and/merger”, seeking to link and complement the mechanisms of the two capabilities in the two markets to enhance the performance of Chinese enterprises' international participation.

Key words: political capability, market capability, ambidextrous capability, interaction effect, foreign investment performance