Mapping Corporate Investments Between China and Europe in an Era of Geoeconomic Competition
通过整合国家层面FDI数据、企业层面所有权信息和调查，研究了2009-2021年中欧企业投资关系，发现企业存在地缘政治对冲行为，但未出现明显脱钩或去全球化趋势。
Abstract The consolidation of geoeconomic competition puts core aspects of global economic interdependence, such as the mutual China‐EU investment relationship, under increased pressure. Headlines about ‘derisking’, ‘decoupling’ or ‘deglobalization’ dominate current debates but tend to be overly simplistic. To push the debate on China‐EU economic relations forward, we provide an empirically driven account of the first phase of the global geoeconomic turn between 2009 and 2021. By triangulating country‐level FDI data, firm‐level ownership information and firm‐level surveys, we find indications of geopolitical hedging by European and Chinese firms, but no clear move towards decoupling or deglobalization. Based on our findings, we advocate for an approach that takes the complexity of state‐firm interactions in global economic relations seriously and integrates different data sources and levels of analysis. With this, we hope to contribute to a more realistic and fine‐grained approach to the important question of China‐EU relations in the 21st century.