Research On The Influence Of Export Technological Sophistication On The Wage GAP Of China’s Manufacturing Industry

After entering the 21st century, with the continuous development of China’s economy, China’s export technological sophistication has also been greatly improved, and since the concept of the export technological sophistication been proposed, it had rapidly become an important tool for scholars all over the world to study transnational and trans regional economic and social problems. In view of its connotation and some research on the effect of international trade and technological progress on wage gap, it has raised our attention to study the relationship between export technological sophistication and the social focus wage gap. In fact, both the international trade and technological progress, embodied on products as the carrier ultimately, Thus, it is feasible in theory to consider the wage gap problem from the respect of export technological sophistication, we can also better take some accurate and effective industry and talent measures for specific industries. Therefore, in this paper, on the basis of previous research, we card the related literatures about export technological sophistication and wage gap, combine Murphy’s labor demand model and Acemoglu’s model with the SS theorem as the theoretical support, and use a panel regression model to study the influence of export technological sophistication measured by China’s 31 provincial data on the wage gap between skilled workers and unskilled workers in 21 industry segments of China’s manufacturing industry. The main conclusions are as follows:Firstly, the export technological sophistication of our country’s manufacturing industry was in a rising state in the year of 2005 to 2013 no matter from the view of the whole or from the segments, and the way of its’upgrading mainly includes independent innovation, foreign technology spillovers and international outsourcing, Based on the calculation method of Hausmann (2005), we measured the overall mean of manufacturing industry’s export technological sophistication, which increased from 15677 yuan of 2005 to 46224 yuan of 2013, it means that the technological content of export products of our country in these years has been greatly improved.Secondly, differ from the existing research results that the effect of the export technological sophistication on the wage gap exhibited monotonic behavior, this paper found that, the effects of the export technological sophistication on the wage gap perform a inverted "U"-type relationship which is increased first and then decreased during 2005-2013 when take the square of export technological sophistication into consideration in the empirical model, This change is mainly due to the relationship between skilled workers and unskilled workers experienced the change from substitution to complementation, when it was in the state of substitute relationship, the upgrading of export technological sophistication wound enlarge the wage gap through increasing the relative demand of skilled workers, while, when it was in the state of complementary relationship, it wound reduce the wage gap through increasing the relative demand of unskilled workers.Thirdly, the increase of physical capital investment, R&D input and average schooling year rate had a significant influence on the expansion of wage gap, while the substantial increase in the supply number of our skilled workers, in a certain extent reduced the relative value of skilled workers. in addition, Foreign direct investment had a negative effect on the wage gap, which indicates that it didn’t generate a substantial demand for skilled workers, this might be due to a using of more advanced technology when factories were invested and built improve the automation degree of the production department, thus what greatly needed in China’s manufacturing sector were the unskilled workers.Despite that the upgrading of export technological sophistication exhibit a effect of self regulating process on the wage gap, namely, it wound produce a negative effect on wage gap when it promote the expansion of wage gap to a certain level, this does not mean that less attention could we pay. The wage gap is a social problem, and export technological sophistication is not the only factor that could make a difference, It will produce an impact on the social stability and economic development when it is beyond a certain level. Therefore, the government should take effective measures to maintain it at a reasonable extent. Several suggestions are put forward in this paper.