China's overseas investment has increased rapidly, despite the global economic outlook, helping recipient countries tackle unemployment.

Outbound investment for 2010 was $67.8 billion, up 21.7 percent from 2009, according to the State Administration of Foreign Exchange.

More than $300 billion was invested abroad by 2010, the fifth-largest foreign investment in the world, said Li Jiping, vice-president of China Development Bank, the leading financier of overseas investment.

By the end of 2011, Chinese companies operating overseas had hired more than 1.1 million people, 800,000 of them foreign employees, he said in Beijing on Tuesday at the third China Overseas Investment Fair.

Despite the uncertainty, China's overseas investment is likely to grow 20 to 30 percent annually in the next two to three years, accounting firm Ernst & Young forecast in a report.

China is the fastest growing source of foreign direct investment to the United States, said Barry Johnson, executive director at the Select USA Agency, a trade and investment promotion body under the US Department of Commerce.

From 2003 to 2011, Chinese firms invested in 172 green-field projects in the US with a total value of more than $7 billion, Johnson said in Beijing. While unemployment in the US is stubbornly high, these projects from China have created 44,000 jobs in the country, he said.

Brazil, Argentina, Australia and Canada will remain top investment destinations, said Eleanor Wu, transaction advisory services partner at Ernst & Young. "China's private business is expected to play a bigger role and will get actively involved in the overseas mergers and acquisitions that used to be dominated by State-owned enterprises," Wu said.

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