Technical Sophistication And Its Determinants

Most of the studies on the export promotion of economy focus on export value or the proportion of export value of GDP which reflect just quantity of export trade, not the quality, the labor productivity or the technology contained in export. At the beginning of 20 century, the scholars’focus transfer gradually from export quantity to export sophistication. Studying the export level of one country on the perspective of export sophistication enables scholars to grasp accurately the international competition of one country’s export and the international division of one country.On the basis of international trade and reference to previous research, we build export sophistication measuring indicator, in order to estimate technical sophistication of a package of export products in China. Comparing with other countries, we locate China’s high-tech industries among international division and measure the level and competition of China’s export. The last part we discuss the influencing factors of export sophistication.Calculating and comparing the export sophistication indicators of 171 countries’, we find that the export sophistication is closely related with the development degree of one country and the more developed countries possess higher export sophistication. China’s export sophistication exceeds that of most developing countries with similar income level, which can be mainly explained by the economy development unbalance of different provinces and the low quality of China’s export products comparing with other products of the same category. In terms of influencing factors of export sophistication, GDP per capita and population size have positive effect on export sophistication; Human capital promotes the export sophistication of developed countries’, while its effect on developing countries is unclear; Foreign direct investment exerts positive and negative effects on developing and developed countries’technical enhancement respectively; while constructing with FDI, institution quality has opposite influence on developing and developed countries.