Overseas Chinese communities are an important determinant in the location choice of greenfield investments made by mainland Chinese multinational enterprises across European regions. Conceptually embedded in a relational approach, this effect is shown through an empirical analysis of an exhaustive set of investment projects across NUTS-1 regions in twenty-six European countries for the period 2003-2010. When controlling for endogeneity bias and the embeddedness of existing Chinese economic activity, we find that the importance of overseas communities in the location choices of Chinese firms is based on increased access to strategic information. Our results confirm that the relationship between the size of an overseas Chinese community and the probability of Chinese investment is stronger for communities hosting newer generations of Chinese migrants; in addition, they partially corroborate that this relationship is stronger when the education level of the community's Chinese migrants is higher. Our findings are particularly robust in the context of knowledgeintensive sectors and high value-added functions.

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AND KEYWORDS AbstractThe contemporary rise of China in the new geo-economy is increasingly pressurising the spatial distribution of financial activity in mainland China and Hong Kong. With the re-emergence of Shanghai, many people foresee the furture demise of Hong Kong as the most important financial centre for the China mainland. This paper shows that conviction seems rather premature. Bases on the concepts of comparative advantage and market segmentation, the extent to which Shanghai and Hong Kong can be considered complementary financial centres is assessed. By using the listings of mainland China based companies on the stock exchange of each financial centre, it is shown that both cities do not only appear to have distinct hinterlands but they also differ strongly in terms of sectoral specialisation.

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