Study On The Impact Of China’s Import Trade Structure On The Quality Of Manufacturing Export Products

As an important subject of building a new development pattern of double cycle,it is an important premise for China to achieve trade power and high-quality economic development that promoting the upgrading of export product quality of manufacturing enterprises.In 2021,the Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China issued the "14th Five-Year Plan" for High-Quality Development of Foreign Trade.This development plan takes optimizing the structure of trade in goods as a key task during the 14 th Five-Year Plan period.It not only emphasizes the need to promote imports from developing countries,especially the least developed countries,but also emphasize expanding the import of advanced technology,important equipment and key parts.This series of policies shows that China’s policy bias towards import and export trade has changed significantly,and demonstrates China’s firm determination to promote the quality upgrading of export products,build a trading power and promote high-quality economy.Existing literature has shown that import trade liberalization will significantly promote the quality improvement of enterprises’ export products.However,the existing literature on the relationship between import trade and enterprise export product quality basically ignores the characteristic fact that there are significant differences in import trade structure.In addition,the academic community has not formed a theoretical analysis framework for the impact of import trade structure on the quality of enterprises’ export products because of the imperfect trade theoretical system and logical structure of heterogeneous enterprises.Based on this,this paper expands the trade theoretical model of heterogeneous enterprises,and discusses the impact and mechanism of import trade structure on the quality of enterprises’ export products at the theoretical and empirical levels.This has important practical and theoretical significance for China’s manufacturing enterprises to upgrade the quality of export products and realize the high-quality development of trade.This paper focuses on the impact of import trade structure on the quality of export products and its mechanism.The main contents include the following five aspects.First,based on the heterogeneous enterprise trade model of Melitz(2003),this paper induced import capital goods and import intermediate goods are introduced at the same time to construct a theoretical analysis framework on the quality of enterprise export products.Under this theoretical analysis framework,this paper analyzes the impact and mechanism of import trade structure on the quality of export products.Second,this paper makes a detailed descriptive statistical analysis of China’s import trade structure in order to grasp the relevant characteristics and facts of China’s import trade structure.And then this paper adopts the post reasoning method widely used in academia to measure the export product quality of Chinese manufacturing enterprises,and makes a preliminary analysis on the relationship between the import trade structure and the export product quality of enterprises.Third,taking 86858 Chinese manufacturing enterprises that imported and exported manufacturing products from 2000 to 2013 as our research object,this paper empirically tests the overall impact of import trade structure on the export product quality of Chinese manufacturing enterprises from these two aspects of overall structure and commodity structure.This paper explores its heterogeneity from different ownership types,different trade modes,different technical levels,export quality differences in different industries and different regional levels,and uses endogenous treatment and a series of robustness tests to verify the research conclusions of this paper again.Fourth,based on the derivation of the theoretical model and the overall empirical test,this paper uses the intermediary effect model,to empirically tests whether the import trade structure has an impact on the quality of enterprises’ export products through the product type expansion effect,quality improvement effect,productivity effect and technological innovation effect.We further use the Sobel test to analyze the effectiveness of the intermediary effect model.Fifthly,this paper discusses the impact of key equipment import on the export product quality of Chinese manufacturing enterprises.And we use the multi-phase difference-indifference method to scientifically evaluate the effect of the national import incentive policy on the quality improvement of export products.The marginal contribution of this paper is to construct a theoretical analysis framework of the impact of import trade structure on the quality of enterprises’ export products,empirically test the impact and mechanism of import trade structure on the quality of enterprises’ export products,and creatively use the multi-phase difference-in-difference method to scientifically evaluate the policy impact of key equipment import incentive policies on the quality of enterprises’ export products.Based on the above research contents,this paper draws the following conclusions.First,the greater the number of types and sources of imported products of Chinese manufacturing enterprises,the more obvious the quality upgrading effect will be on enterprises.The higher the concentration of types and sources of imported products,the more unfavorable it is for enterprises to upgrade the quality of export products.Among them,the increase in the number of types and sources of imported products has a stronger effect on the improvement of export product quality of private enterprises,mixed trade enterprises,medium technology enterprises,heterogeneous industry enterprises and enterprises in central and western regions.Second,the import of capital goods and intermediate goods has significantly promoted the export product quality of Chinese manufacturing enterprises.This conclusion is still valid after a series of robustness tests.Among them,the import of capital goods and intermediate goods has a significant positive spillover effect on the export product quality of enterprises in the eastern region,processing trade and mixed trade enterprises,private enterprises and foreign-funded enterprises.Third,capital goods import mainly promotes the quality upgrading of enterprises’ export products through product type expansion effect,productivity effect and technological innovation effect.While intermediate goods import improves the quality of enterprises’ export products through product type expansion effect,quality improvement effect,productivity effect and technological innovation effect.Fourth,the import of intermediate goods and capital goods play a positive regulatory role in the process of affecting the quality of export products.While investing in imported intermediate products,enterprises also need to invest matching advanced equipment,key parts and other imported capital products to assist production,otherwise they will not be able to play this positive regulatory role and improve the quality of export products.Fifth,the import of key equipment and the expansion of the import scale of key equipment will significantly promote the improvement of the quality of export products;The key equipment import incentive policy implemented by the state has significantly promoted the improvement of the quality of enterprises’ export products.This conclusion is still valid after experiencing parallel trend hypothesis,placebo test and a series of robustness tests.Finally,based on the above conclusions,the corresponding policy suggestions are put forward.