The Relationship Between Export And Productivity Growth

Export and productivity are one of the study themes of foreign trade economicgrowth. Although, our research mostly concentrated in the industrial or manufacturingand so on in this area, but no one researches the equipment manufacturing industry inthis field. As we all know, China’s equipment manufacturing industry plays a veryimportant role in foreign trade. Since the reform and opening, the export trade ofChina’s equipment manufacturing industry developed rapidly, especially, after the Asianfinancial crisis. The export value of China’s equipment manufacturing industryincreased from232.886billion Yuan to6.511979trillion Yuan since1997. It wasincreased by nearly30times in15years. This paper make the equipment manufacturingindustry as research object; it will not only extends and enriches research scope of therelationship between exports and productivity, but also can discover the different effectsof productivity about the export of equipment manufacturing industry.In the productivity analysis, this paper analyzes the meaning and connotation ofproductivity, and finds the focus of this research is to study the relationship betweenexport trade and TFP growth firstly. On this basis, this paper takes advantage of thenon-parametric Malmquist index method to calculate the TFP and its decompositionindicators of China’s equipment manufacturing industry. It finds that China’s equipmentmanufacturing industry TFP shows a rapid growth trend, and the annual average growthrate is7%.In the theoretical analysis, this paper reviews the relationship between export andproductivity growth of the present research from two aspects firstly, namely，theoretical analysis and empirical study. This paper proposes three export promotionmechanisms of productivity growth, namely economies scale effect, technologicalspillovers effect and resource reallocation effect. On this basis, This paper conductedin-depth analysis of these three mechanisms, in order to discover how export promotesthe growth of productivity.In the empirical research, based on theoretical analysis, this paper uses the interactionterm approach to put together the three mechanisms into one Equation, and in order totest their different effects on productivity. Test results show that the technology spillovereffects and the resource reallocation effect can significantly promote equipmentmanufacturing productivity growth, while economies scale effect has had hindered. Finally, according to the results of empirical testing, this article proposesappropriate policy recommendations from three aspects, namely economic structuretransformation, reform of state-owned enterprises and R&D investment, to helpChina’s equipment manufacturing industry to gain more dynamic benefits from foreigntrade, and further contributing to productivity growth.