Outward FDI in China's hotel industry: An inward FDI perspective

Outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) from emerging economies in the hospitality industry, the hotel sector in particular, has drastically increased in recent years. Based on Dunning's eclectic paradigm/Ownership-Location-Internalization (OLI) theory and the Investment Development Path (IDP) theory, the OFDI in the hotel sector was assessed from the home country's perspective using an inward FDI (IFDI) approach. Using China as a case study, this paper employed panel data and a negative binomial regression method to examine the impact of IFDI on hotel OFDI. The empirical findings showed that hotel-related IFDI is an important source of the ownership advantage of China's hotel OFDI. Meanwhile, China's IFDI in the hotel industry appear to exert positive and significant effects on its hotel OFDI. Furthermore, international market proximity, economic development, and tourism development were found to moderate significantly these effects. Finally, additional robustness checks showed that the results are reliable.