| Since the Fourth Industrial Revolution,major countries around the world have competed to introduce major policies and strategies for scientific and technological innovation,and innovation has played a more significant role in economic development than ever before.The competition in the international market has gradually changed from the previous price competition to scientific and technological competition,and the shift of China’s current economy from a stage of high-speed growth to a stage of high-quality development,as well as the increasingly fierce pressure of international economic competition require China to transform from the factor and investment-driven mode to innovation-driven mode as soon as possible.The report of the 19th CPC National Congress further pointed out that innovation is the first driving force leading development and the strategic support for building a modern economic system.Specially,in the new journey of comprehensively building a socialist country,reform and innovation is bound to be the fundamental driving force to promote high-quality economic development,improve economic strength,scientific and technological strength,and comprehensive national strength and comprehensively build a modern socialist country.In recent years,government at all levels have adopted various measures to encourage and promote innovative development,establish a technological innovation system with enterprises as the mainstay and market as the guide,and promote deep integration of production,education and research,soas to strengthen the national innovation system,enhance strategic scientific and technological strength,deepen the reform of the scientific and technological system.From the perspective of reality,the subject status of technology innovation in Chinese enterprises has gradually improved.According to data from the National Bureau of Statistics,in 2002,the government spent 39.75 billion RMB on research and experimental development,while enterprises spent 1.78 times of the amount,or 70.8 billion RMB;by 2019,the government spent 453.73 billion RMB on research and experimental development,while enterprises spent 1,688.715 billion RMB,3.72 times of the governmental expenditure.Therefore,in the context of the fourth industrial revolution,the factor cost advantage is gradually reduced,and the innovation ability has become the main advantage of market competitiveness.The internal motivation of enterprise innovation has turned enterprises into the main body of innovation in the real sense gradually.However,in recent years,the United States has blindly pursued the trade policies of"America First" and "America Great",and has sought to address the so-called "unfair trade between countries and the United States" through unilateral policies such as withdrawal from international agreements,renegotiation and tariff threats,which have brought great uncertainty to trade globalization and liberalization,and consequently an endless stream of "anti-globalization." The United States has ignored Chinese efforts and achievements over the years in strengthening intellectual property rights protection and improving the business environment for foreign investors.At the same time,it has made a lot of negative evaluations of China,and adopted a series of negative economic and trade measures,such as imposing tariffs and restricting investment,promoting trade protectionism,constantly creating trade frictions,and increasing uncertainty in trade policies.Moreover,the US has also taken the initiative to extend the trade war with China to the field of technology,through the Export Control Reform Act to give its Ministry of Commerce the right to control the export,re-export or transfer of key technologies defined by it,to include artificial intelligence,chips,robots and other 14 types of emerging technology areas in the scope of control,and to impose sanctions on high-tech enterprises such as ZTE and Huawei.Those measures has had a serious impact on the global trade environment,disrupted the original trade order and exacerbated the trade policy uncertainty faced by Chinese enterprises.Trade policy uncertainty has once again become an important factor threatening the economic development of countries worldwide.With the increasing economic scale and the improvement of innovation ability of Chinese enterprises,more and more enterprises are participating in the international market competition and integrating into the tendency of world economic development.Based on this background,the following issues are made the focus of this study.Does trade policy uncertainty affect business innovation?What is the mechanism of trade policy uncertainty affecting enterprise innovation?And is there heterogeneity in its impact on enterprise innovation?This study systematically analyzes the impact of trade policy uncertainty on enterprise innovation from theoretical and empirical aspects,in a bid to promote the implementation of innovation-driven strategy,the construction of a modern economic system and the development of high-quality economy.The main research content of this paper consists of seven chapters,which can be divided into four parts,as follows:The first part,that is,the first chapter of the paper,is the "Introduction",which clarifies the research background and significance,defines the basic concepts involved in the research,sorts out the research ideas and framework structure,summarizes the research methods,and explains the main contributions of the paper.The second part is theoretical analysis,including Chapter 2 "Theoretical Basis and Literature Review" and Chapter 3 "Theoretical Mechanism Analysis and Research Hypothesis".Among them,Chapter 2 mainly elaborates the theoretical basis of theoretical analysis,including innovation theory,trade theory and real option theory.At the same time,it comprehensively reviews the existing literature on enterprise innovation,economic policy uncertainty,trade policy uncertainty and other aspects,forms the context of the existing research,reviews and points out the shortcomings of them.Chapter 3,on the basis of Chapter 2,analyzes the impact of trade policy uncertainty on enterprise innovation from the theoretical perspective,as well as the internal impact mechanism,and puts forward the research hypothesis.The third part is empirical analysis,including Chapter 4,Chapter 5 and Chapter 6.Chapter 4 examines the causal effect of trade policy uncertainty on enterprise innovation.Taking the event of "the decline of trade policy uncertainty after China’s accession to the World Trade Organization" as the policy impact,it constructs a double difference model.The results show that the decline of trade policy uncertainty can significantly promote enterprise innovation,and the results are robust.Chapter 5 is mechanism analysis,furnishing an empirical test of the theoretical mechanism and relevant hypotheses proposed in Chapter 3.Among them,Heckman two-step method is used to test the mechanism of FDI,and the intermediary effect model is used to test the mechanism of government subsidies and global value chain embedding.The test results show that trade policy uncertainty can affect enterprise innovation through three channels:foreign direct investment,global value chain embedding and government subsidies.This indicates that the research hypothesis put forward in Chapter 3 is valid;Chapter 6 discusses the heterogeneity of the impact of trade policy uncertainty on enterprise innovation from five perspectives:industry,innovation level,trade model,location and enterprise type.The main conclusions are as follows:(1)The decline of trade policy uncertainty has an"inverted U" impact on different industries and enterprises with different innovation levels.(2)The impact of trade policy uncertainty on enterprises in the east,central and west weakens sequentially.(3)Trade policy uncertainty has a stronger effect on the innovation of export-oriented enterprises than on that of non export-oriented enterprises.(4)The impact of trade policy uncertainty on the innovation of general trade enterprises,mixed trading enterprises and processing trade enterprises weakens sequentially.The fourth part,Chapter 7,summarizes the researchconclusions,puts forward a series of policy suggestions.Compared with the existing literature,the main contributions of this paper are as follows:First,research perspective innovation.The existing literature on the influencing factors of enterprise innovation mainly focuses on the institutional environment,government funding and trade.Among them,the impact of the institutional environment on enterprise innovation is mainly studied from the two aspects of formal systems(such as laws and regulations)and informal systems(such as ethics,culture,etc.).Regarding the impact of government funding on enterprise innovation,the main research focus is on the leverage effect,extrusion effect and mixed effect.Regarding the impact of trade on enterprise innovation,we mainly study tariffs,exports,market competition,trade liberalization and other aspects.However,under the background of current global economic restructuring,less attention is paid to the trade policy uncertainty caused by interest games between countries that is becoming an important factor affecting enterprise innovation.This paper finds that trade policy uncertainty has an important impact on enterprise innovation,expanding not only the research perspective of the existing literature on the influencing factors of enterprise innovation,but also its understanding of the microeconomic impact of trade policy uncertainty.In addition,this paper analyzes the impact mechanism of trade policy uncertainty onenterprise innovation,and originally studies the channels of outward direct investment,the channels of global value chain embedding,and the channels of government subsidies.Moreover,when analyzing the heterogeneity of trade policy uncertainty,the paper puts forward the perspectives of industry heterogeneity,enterprise innovation level heterogeneity,enterprise location heterogeneity,enterprise type heterogeneity and trade mode heterogeneity.Second,theoretical innovation.This paper clarifies the theoretical mechanism of trade policy uncertainty affecting enterprise innovation.Due to the large difference between enterprise innovation and other economic activities of enterprises,the impact mechanism of trade policy uncertainty on enterprise innovation is special.Therefore,based on the analysis of the characteristics of enterprise innovation,this paper analyzes in depth the three theoretical mechanisms of trade policy uncertainty affecting enterprise innovation:the impact effect based on foreign direct investment channels,the impact effect based on global value chain embedded channels,and the impact effect based on government subsidy channels.Based on this,the research hypotheses are put forward and empirically tested.Third,the innovation of research methods,index selection and other aspects provides new empirical evidence about the impact of trade policy uncertainty on enterprise innovation.In order to obtain reliable new empirical evidence,this paper has carefully considered and deliberated the selection of indicators,variable construction,method selection,and model construction.It compares and analyzes the selection of a variety of relevant indicators and variable construction in the existing research,and divides the enterprise innovation patents into substantive innovation patents and strategic innovation patents.Considering that substantive innovation patents are advanced at a high level of technology and can empower future enterprise production,substantive innovation patents are selected to portray enterprise innovation.The tariff measurement method proposed by Handley and Limao(2016)is selected to characterize trade policy uncertainty,which put forward the key assumption that "tariffs are the only source of trade policy uncertainty",overcoming the subjective nature of the word frequency statistics method;two methods are used to construct a benchmark model,in order to ensure the reliability of the model regression results;G·Fields decomposition is also carried out.The study of the mechanism of action has also been conducted from both theoretical mechanisms and empirical evidence and mutually supportive conclusions obtained.In the empirical analysis section,the Heckman two-stage model is used to take into account the self-selecting behavior of OFDI and the possible sample selectivity bias,while the common mediation effect model is used for the examination of the global value chain embedding channel and the government subsidy channel.Standard and rigorous empirical research have provided new,robust and micro-level empirical evidence on the impact of trade policy uncertainty on enterprise innovation. |
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