The Commerce Ministry denied on Tuesday any connection between two straight months of decline in foreign direct investment in China and its anti-monopoly measures. FDI into China fell by 14 percent to $7.2 billion last month from a year earlier, after a 17 percent drop in July. It was the first consecutive double-digit decline since 2009. In the first eight months of 2014, China’s FDI fell by 1.8 percent from a year ago to $78.3 billion. Ministry spokesman Shen Danyang attributed the drop to the weak global economy, fluctuation of the yuan and soaring costs, which made investing in China’s low-end manufacturing unattractive. Last year, average manufacturing costs in China were only 30 percent lower than in the US, he said. As a consequence, FDI in China’s manufacturing in the first eight months slumped by 15.7 percent compared with a year earlier, and its share in total inbound investment retreated to 35 percent.
Posted on: Wed, 17 Sep 2014 01:28:53 +0000