Imports,Transnational Outsourcing And Manufacturing Total Factor Prodructivity

International technology spillovers are playing an important role in promoting TFP across the developing countries.Due to the constraint of capital and the shortage of R&D Investment,when the developing countries try to approach the frontier of the TFP,the international technology spillovers from developed countries become more important.The channels include international trade,foreign direct investment(FDI),international technology aid and so on.As the largest trading nation,China has taken the opportunity of the import trade to utilize plenty of intermediate products and capital goods,and the transnational outsourcing also help us get involved in the high-tech production process directly.This paper aims to analyze the influence mechanism of import trade,transnational outsourcing and TFP on manufacturing sector.In this sense,we propose several propositions and try to contribute to the theoretical understanding of how the TFP is influenced by international trade and the international outsourcing as mentioned.Based on the related literature,we take transnational outsourcing as a new variable and empirically test the impact of the two channels of international technology spillovers from the perspectives of total manufacturing and its industrial classification.There are three main results in this paper:(1)From the perspective of total manufacturing,the import spillover promotes TFP significantly,while the relationship between transnational outsourcing and manufacturing TFP is not clear yet.(2)From the perspective of industrial classification,the import spillover boosts the TFP both in high-tech industrial group and low-tech industrial group,which furthermore strengthen the effect of import on the manufacturing TFP.However,transnational outsourcing has not affected the TFP clearly in high-tech industrial group while it present a significant negative effect on TFP in low-tech industrial group.(3)After controlling the factors of import and transnational outsourcing,export has a negative effect on TFP in the total manufacturing and industrial classification.This finding reveals that the "productivity paradox" of Chinese manufacturing firms may exists at the industrial level.The main innovation of this paper is that on the one hand,we take the special characteristic of Chinese manufacturing and its changing tendency of TFP into account,and analyse the effect of import trade and transnational outsourcing on manufacturing TFP systematically as well as control for various relevant factors,such as export,FDI,domestic R&D investment and capital endowment;on the other hand,we adopt various measurement methods and a larger database to make the regression analysis more accurate.There are also some deficiencies in this paper as we lack of a more accurate classification standard.Besides,the result we find from the industrial level needs to be confirmed from the micro level.