Speed of China’s OFDIs to the Belt and Road Initiative destinations: State equity, industry competition, and the moderating effects of the policy

Organizational timely investments determine the success of the Belt and Road Initiative (BRI), yet few studies have explored the antecedents of those speed decisions. Based on a dataset of Chinese-listed firms over 11 years, we address this research paucity by incorporating the push and pull antecedents of OFDIs. The study revealed that industry competition significantly facilitates organizational BRI investment speed after the launch of the initiative, but such facilitative effects become weaker for firms located in the key BRI-participating provinces. Intriguingly, firms with greater state equity are slow after the launch of the BRI, and their slow gestures become more severe in those key provinces. The additional tests implicated that this result occurs because of inadequate positioning of those inland provinces. Overall, the study clarified the nature of the BRI by exploring the speed dimension. The findings also challenged the conventional wisdom of treating firms with greater state equity as obedient extensions of the government by unmasking their conservative attitudes toward the BRI, highlighting some fallacies of contemporary BRI policy. Third, the temporal and geographic aspects should be applied simultaneously to examine the policy effects of the BRI.