| The relationship between international trade and wage inequality has always been one of the focuses of the economic circles.With the deepening of the margins of digital technology in the field of international trade,cross-border digital trade has received increasing attention.From the perspective of international trade,cross-border digital trade is an indispensable part of the modern international trading system.The characteristics of cross-border digital trade,such as high efficiency,covenant-lite and boundary weakening,are reshaping the competitive pattern of global trade.From the perspective of income distribution,individuals,countries and even the world may be affected to varying degrees by the income distribution of cross-border digital trade.In addition,in recent years,China's wage imbalances have been relatively serious,which can easily lead to emotional instability of workers,some families are living beyond their means,and are not conducive to the work progress of employees,people's physical and mental health,and the equality of higher education,empty nesting in backward areas and excessive clustering in developed regions.Therefore,this article attempts to explore ways to crack wage imbalances from the perspective of cross-border digital trade.In order to analyze the effect,mechanism and heterogeneity of cross-border digital trade on wage inequality,this study focuses on the following three aspects:(1)Based on the theory of network externality,how does digital import and export trade affect wage inequality among Chinese firms in different types of firms,industries and regions?(2)Based on Mincer-type model,how does the development of import and export digital trade change the wage gap between skilled and unskilled workers in Chinese firms?(3)From the perspective of spatial pattern,how does the growth of import and export digital trade affect the wage imbalance among regions in China?After reading relevant literature,the author sorts out the connotation and measurement methods of cross-border digital trade,the types and measurement indicators of income inequality,the model evolution and impact mechanism of international trade and income inequality,the role of import and export on wage inequality,and the positive and negative correlations between international digital trade and income inequality.It can be concluded from this that the core elements of cross-border digital trade are digital technology and international trade,as well as the theoretical mechanism of import and export digital trade and various types of wage inequality.In addition,this paper makes a descriptive statistical analysis of the development status of cross-border digital trade and income inequality in the world and China.Based on this,it analyzes the opportunities and challenges brought by cross-border digital trade to income equality.On the one hand,cross-border digital trade provides an excellent opportunity for income equality.Many previously weak firms and idle social labor have joined them,expanding their own markets in different customs,virtually accelerating the free flow of goods and capital around the world,improving the employment and entrepreneurship opportunities of labor force,and gradually easing the income inequality among firms.On the other hand,the “crowding-out effect”,“substitution effect” and some undesirable phenomena caused by cross-border digital trade bring new challenges to income equality.In short,the “puzzle” of the relationship between cross-border digital trade and income equalization has yet to be explored.In order to solve the above “puzzle”,based on the current situation and theoretical analysis of cross-border digital trade and wage inequality,according to the data characteristics of existing Chinese firms,the “own value” and “synergy value” of the network,the bilateral characteristics of international trade,etc.,this paper creates a bilateral continuous difference model,and uses the matching data of Chinese industrial firms and import and export commodities in HS6 code,this paper tests the effect and mechanism of China's import and export digital trade on different types of wage inequality,and puts forward a new way to find out the potential causes and mitigation ways of China's labor income imbalance.The conclusions of this empirical study can be summarized into the following three aspects.The first is the effect of China's import and export digital trade on wage equality among firms.By constructing the corresponding bilateral continuous difference model,this paper discusses the relationship between the import and export digital trade and the wage inequality of enterprises,mainly including the wage inequality between the overall enterprises,between the industries and within the industries,as well as the relationship between cross-border digital trade and upper and lower side wage gap in different quantile range.The results prove that:(1)The growth of import and export digital trade can significantly weaken the wage imbalance between firms and industries,but it aggravates the wage inequality between industries.(2)As for the sub samples,export digital trade alleviates the inequality between the firms with medium wage level,but the firms with high wage cannot escape the “sharpening effect”;while import digital trade promotes the firms with medium wage level to be closer to the median,it also expands the wage inequality between the firms with low wage level and those with high wage level.(3)As far as the channel mechanism is concerned,compared with the traditional international trade,export digital trade is conducive to improving the export density margin,inhibiting the growth of category margin and regional margin,so as to promote more equal wages among firms;import digital trade indirectly promotes the development of equal wages among firms by reducing the distance cost,improving the export technological sophistication and the speed of import trade,but this effect has also been indirectly weakened by the widening price gap.(4)The effects of digital trade in imports and exports on wage inequality among firms have certain heterogeneous effects due to differences in the type of firm,the location of the industrial chain,and the region.For example,in terms of the heterogeneous effect of financing constraints,high financing-constrained firms cansignificantly expand the negative effect of export digital trade on wage inequality.In the process of export digital trade,low financing-constrained firms have less power to reverse the change of wage inequality among firms.In contrast,import digital trade is more helpful to firms with low financing constraints.The second is the effect of China's import and export digital trade on the skills premium within firms.Based on the bilateral continuous difference model and the Mincer-type model,the impact of import and export digital trade on wage inequality within firms and its mechanism are further analyzed.The study found that:(1)Export digital trade has significantly promoted the increase of skill premium in firms,while import digital trade has not had a substantial impact on this.(2)The export digital trade of medium and low wage firms will widen the wage gap within firms,while the higher wage firms will weaken the wage inequality;among all kinds of wage levels,import digital trade only significantly aggravates the imbalance in the low-wage firms.(3)The positive effect of export digital trade on intra-firm skill premium will be greater with the increase of firm's TFP and city's education investment;however,the effect of import digital trade on the wage imbalance in low-wage firms will weaken with the increase of capital intensity and sales volume,but it will strengthen with the increase of tariff.(4)The correlation of cross-border digital trade with skill premium in the firm will have differentiating effects depending on the type of business,industry and region.For example,in terms of the heterogeneity effect of firm size,compared with large firms,the export digital trade of small and micro firms generates a higher skill premium,while the skill premium of medium firms has no significant difference.In the imported digital trade,large firms will not significantly increase the skill premium,but the import digital trade of small,medium and micro firms can positively improve the intra-firm skill premium,especially for small and micro firms.The third is the influence of China's import and export digital trade on income inequality in dimensions of space.There are differences in resource endowment,economic development,human capital,and transportation capacity in different regions.Therefore,in addition to wage inequality between and within enterprises,wage inequality is also reflected in the gap between regions.Similarly,this paper also analyzes the relationship between import and export digital trade and labor income spatial imbalance with the help of bilateral continuous difference model.The test results show that:(1)The development of import and export digital trade has significantly improved the spatial distribution of wages.Compared with the province,export digital trade has played a more significant role in promoting equalization of wages across provinces.(2)The increase in export digital trade can reduce the polarization of wages between regions,but also cause the labor income in regions with higher and middle wages to deviate from the median level.In contrast,the development of digital import trade has a regional wage effect of “protecting the bottom and sharpened the upper,and the competition of middle income groups”.(3)The regional scientific and technological innovation and the increase of foreign direct investment have significantly weakened the positive effect of export digital trade on regional wage equality.For import digital trade,in addition to technological innovation and foreign direct investment,urban education investment also has a weakening moderating effect.In short,in the development of cross-border digital trade,the signal to relieve wage inequality has gradually been radiated from individual regions to the whole of China.The main innovations of this paper are as follows: First,most of the existing researches analyze income inequality from the perspective of traditional international trade.In contrast,this paper conducts research on import and export digital trade and wage inequality.Second,from an empirical perspective,this paper constructs a bilateral continuous difference model to assess the actual effect of cross-border digital trade on wage inequality.In terms of measuring wage inequality,in the sub-sample regression,this paper uses the relative dispersion and quantile methods to create upper and lower relative dispersion in different quantile intervals to measure inequality.The advantage of this algorithm is that we can clearly observe the relative gap and direction of labor income in different quantile intervals;in the study of wage inequality within enterprises,this paper refers to and improves the estimation method of Chen et al.(2017a),using industry-province-2004 enterprises aggregated indicators at the level to represent the proportion of skilled workers.Third,in terms of data selection,this article not only includes macro-level data,such as China City Statistical Yearbook data and World Bank development indicators,but also import and export commodity information from the Alibaba website,China Customs Trade Database 2000-2013 and China Industry Business Performance Data 1998-2013,so as to carry out empirical test at the micro level.Overall,this article is innovative in terms of theoretical models,analysis perspectives and effect assessments,and even sample selection and index measurement.This paper mainly begins from three aspects of macro,meso and micro,overall and sub-sample data,the perspective of import and export digital trade,and the perspective of wage inequality in enterprises and regions.It provides a theoretical and empirical basis for explaining the development of cross-border digital trade to change the wage inequality in China,provides a direction for alleviating the labor income distribution among enterprises,within enterprises and among regions,and provides a basis for measuring methods for the follow-up research on cross-border digital trade.This research has theoretical value,practical significance and policy reference. |
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