Abstract: The reverse technology spillover effect of the outward foreign direct investment (OFDI) to the technological progress of the home country is a relatively new topic of the international economics and it is also one of the important expectations for which the Chinese government launched the‘going out'strategy. The paper applies the nonlinear threshold model to study empirically the reverse technology spillover effect of China's OFDI and the impact of technology gap between China and the world, the OFDI scale and other variables on it based on the inter-provincial panel data from 2003~2009.The results show that under the open economy condition, the reverse technology spillovers effect of China's OFDI really exists, but there is a large difference in reverse technology spillover among regions of China, which is conditioned by the OFDI scale and technology gap. The OFDI scale and technology gap separately has a single and dual-threshold effect. Therefore, according to the imbalance of regional development in China, the government should adopt different policies to achieve the reverse technology spillovers effect.

Key words: OFDI, technology gap, reverse technology spillovers, threshold model