Spatial Spillover Effects of China's Agricultural Outward Foreign Direct Investment on ASEAN Food Security

Abstract

Food security is a cornerstone of national strategic security and social welfare, an issue of growing salience in an era of deepening global economic interdependence. ASEAN, as a regionally integrated international organisation fulfilling multifaceted governance functions, plays a pivotal role in shaping food security outcomes across Southeast Asia. Using balanced panel data from ten ASEAN member states over the period 2000–2022, this study constructs a multidimensional Food Security Index (FSI) via principal component analysis (PCA), and employs ordinary least squares (OLS) estimation, fixed-effects panel regression, and a panel vector autoregression (PVAR) model to examine the relationship between ASEAN food security and China's agricultural outward foreign direct investment (AGRI-OFDI). Impulse response functions (IRFs) are further employed to trace the time-varying dynamics of these relationships. Three principal findings emerge: (1) improved food security is a key antecedent of AGRI-OFDI expansion, with host-country food security gains significantly stimulating subsequent agricultural capital inflows; (2) agricultural gross output is negatively associated with food security, suggesting that output-centric agricultural development strategies may fail to translate into substantive food security gains owing to post-harvest losses, ecological constraints, and distributional imbalances; and (3) the effects of trade openness and rural population size exhibit marked cross-country heterogeneity, reflecting the moderating roles of intra-regional development gradients and structural disparities.