| For a long time,China’s export trade has maintained rapid growth relying on cost advantages.However,with the transformation of domestic factor structure,the traditional export comparative advantage is weakened,and it is urgent to cultivate new international competitive advantages.Product quality upgrading is an important support to enhance the competitiveness of export products and an important way to promote the high-quality development of trade.However,the world is in a great change that has not been seen in a century,and the trend of anti-globalization and trade protectionism are becoming more and more intense.At the same time,China is in the key period of transforming the development mode,optimizing the economic structure and transforming the growth power,besides Chinese independent research and development of key core technologies and parts needs to be broken through,and thus the quality upgrading of export products is facing big challenges.《The guiding opinions of the CPC Central Committee and the State Council on promoting the high-quality development of trade》pointed out that,it need strengthen the construction of traderelated legal system and speed up institutional opening(such as international cooperation in intellectual property protection)to improve the quality of export products and promote the high-quality development of trade.At the same time,informal institutions building and international communication are also conducive to improving the domestic and international environment,and promote export products quality.Considering the realistic background,the correlation between different types of institutions and the quality of export products,and the existing research experience,this paper firstly studies whether the international cooperation in patent prosecution institution has improved firms’ export products quality from the perspective of formal institutions.Then examines the impact of the level of generalized morality of export destinations on the firms’ export products quality from the perspective of informal institutions.Finally,this paper puts formal institutions and informal institutions in the same framework,studies the interactive effect of the level of generalized morality and product quality supervision institutions on export products quality.First,this paper analyzes the typical facts of formal institutions,informal institutions and export products quality.From 2000 to 2020,the level and ranking of China’s overall formal institutions has been increasing.Export destinations with a higher level of formal institutions are concentrated in Europe,and export destinations with a high level of economic development have better formal institutions.The level of China’s overall informal institutions increased after an initial decrease,and the level of the informal institutions in inland provinces is relatively low.The level of generalized morality of most provinces fluctuates greatly,but the change trend of Northeast China and Inner Mongolia Autonomous Region is stable and downward.Export destinations with low level of current formal institutions or high level of historical formal institutions have higher level of informal institutions.The level of the informal institutions of export destinations is positively related to the level of the historical formal institutions and negatively related to the level of the current formal institutions.The quality of products export to countries with higher level of formal institutions or informal institutions is relatively high.Then,from the perspective of formal institutions,combining the practical requirements of institutional openness and the important role of new technology in product quality upgrade,this paper studies the impact of international cooperation in the patent prosecution institution on export products quality.Taking “Patent Prosecution Highway” agreements signed between China and other countries in 2011-2013 as a quasi-natural experiment,a triple-difference model was constructed.The study found that international cooperation in the patent prosecution institution in the form of the signing of “Patent Prosecution Highway” agreements has increased the export value of firms in patent-intensive industries to a greater extent.By decomposing the amount of firms’ export growth,it is found that the improvement of export quality of continuous products is the root of keeping export price of sustainable products unchanged and raising the export quantity of sustainable products,which further leads to the growth of export volume of sustainable products and firms.The improvement of imported intermediate quality is the mechanism for the agreement to improve the exports quality of continuous product.In addition,agreements connected with Patent Cooperation Treaty(PCT)and agreements signed with countries with higher levels of intellectual property protection have more significant effect.To a certain extent,the conclusion indicates that institutional construction can strengthen the advantages of a“big trading country” by promoting the process s of building a “powerful trading country”.Subsequently,from the perspective of informal institutions,based on the general restrictive effect of generalized morality on individual behavior and the consistency of generalized morality and Chinese excellent moral culture,this article studies the impact of the level of generalized morality of export destinations on the export products quality.By constructing a game model including1 exporters,distributors and market competitors at export destination under incomplete contract conditions,this paper analyzes the impact of the level of generalized morality of export destinations on the export products quality through the channel of restricting the behavior of distributors and market competitors.Furthermore,this paper constructs an econometric model,the result shows that the higher level of generalized morality of export destinations is conducive to promoting firms to export higher quality products.The results of subsample regression and interaction term regression both show that decreasing expected default risk and infringement risk faced by exporters is the main channel of generalized morality affecting export quality.Finally,this paper puts the formal institutions and the informal institutions in the same research framework,based on the requirements of strengthening trade-related legal institutions construction and the relationship between the rule of law and the rule of virtue,this paper focuses on the interactive effect of the product quality supervision institution as a formal institution and the general morality as an informal institution on the quality of export products,and investigates whether the impact of product quality supervision institutions on export product quality is dependent on the level of generalized morality,that is,the moderating effect of the level of generalized morality on the impact of supervision institution is studied.Based on the institutional economics theory,this article analyzes the effect of higher supervision institution quality on export products quality by reducing firms’ opportunistic tendency,and a higher level of generalized morality has a positive effect on the impact of the supervision institution by improving the degree of firms’ compliance with the law,regulating the behavior of law enforcers,and expanding the scope of law enforcement.Data of spot-checking of products quality collected by hand is used for empirical research,and the results verifies that the effect that the higher quality of the supervision institutions improve the quality of export products is positively dependent on the regional level of generalized morality.And the empirical result of the mediating effect test verifies the existence of this mechanism.In addition,the higher level of supervision institutions quality and generalized morality have a greater impact on state-owned enterprises,listed companies,and companies in industries with a higher degree of market competition.Based on the conclusions,this article provides policy implications from three different aspects,which are strengthening the openness and cooperation of formal institutions;strengthening the exchanges of informal institutions between countries;strengthening the degree of integration of informal institutions and formal institutions. |
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