On The Influencing Factors Of China's High-tech Imports & Exports

With a remarkable developing speed in recent years, China's economy has also encountered several setbacks, among which the declining profit and inefficient production in manufacturing enterprises are particularly conspicuous. To solve the tough problem, many scholars pointed out that it's necessary to offset the technological gap in manufacturing industry between China and developed economies. As we know, technology is served as the No.1 factor for high-tech industry. A study on the factors affecting high-tech import and export shall be of huge importance to the advancement of technological level in high-tech industry and the narrowing of technological gap.Based on predecessors'research on China's high-tech industry and international trade on high-tech products, the thesis comes out with various factors influencing imports & exports of high-tech products by defining the high-tech industry and products. In addition, the thesis raises the hypothesis which is proved by empirical analysis to ascertain the influencing direction of factors to China's high-tech imports & exports. After experiments of various empirical methods such as Rigid Regression, Principal Component Regression and Partial Least-Squares Regression etc., Partial Least-Squares Regression is chosen to be the main tool of empirical study . The thesis then conducts positive analysis in those influencing factors and ranks their VIP index on the dependent variable, leading to the conclusion that the importance of foreign factors is greater than that of domestic factors. Explanation is given afterwards with related theories and realities being considered.There are two main conclusions in this thesis. On one hand, multinational corporations (MNCs) play an important role in the fast development of high-tech industry in China. The intra-corporation trade crossing national borders in MNCs has pushed the trade on commodity to the level of working processes and sectors, allocating sectors of different scales to countries in terms of their factor endowment. That is the very reason for the high relevance between high-tech export and import, and for a greater influence of FDI and scale economy on high-tech export and import. On the other hand, due to the constraints including technological level and institutional factors exist, domestic factors such as R&D investment, industry cluster and industry structure have much less influence on high-tech export and import in China, suggesting that our high-tech industry, which only served in one of the processes of the global production system, lacks internal motivations. Our home-invested high-tech business is still in the condition of insufficient competitiveness.The Second Generation of Multiple regression is used in the empirical study. Regression results indicate that R&D investment and industry cluster have much less influence on high-tech export and import in China, contradicting traditional theories about high-tech industry. The thesis analyzes the reason for contradiction specificly, and proposed respective advices on policy.