The Influence Of Labor Cost Change On The Quality Of China's Manufacturing Export Products

Since the reform and opening up,China's manufacturing industry developed rapidly,and it has maintained a competitive advantage in the international market by relying on abundant and cheap labor resources,and has become a big exporter of manufacturing industry.However,with the change of labor supply structure in China,labor supply tends to decrease,and demographic dividend gradually disappears,resulting in a sharp rise in labor costs.The increase in labor costs makes the profit space for enterprises to reduce the price of export products to be compressed,and China's manufacturing industry is facing the cost challenge of rising labor costs.In order to improve or maintain the competitive advantage of Chinese manufacturing industry in the international market,it is particularly important to improve the quality of export products.China's export products need to transform from "win by quantity"to "win by quality".This paper analyzes the relationship between the labor cost and the quality of the export products of the manufacturing industry,in order to provide theoretical and practical reference for the China's manufacturing industry.This paper estimates the standard quality index of SITC four bit code products exported from China's manufacturing industry from2002to2011 years,using the quality index data of the SITC four bit products exported by all countries in the world for 1984-2011 years calculated by Feenstra&Romalis(2013).Then it is aggregated into manufacturing industry and its 27 sub sectors,and the quality index of export products is obtained.Next a comparative analysis is made of the changes in the quality of export products in the whole manufacturing sector and subsectors.In addition,according to the method of industry classification based on OCED industry R&D content,the subdivision industries of manufacturing industry are divided into high,medium and low technology manufacturing industries,and the change trend of the export product quality of the three types of industries is analyzed respectively.Finally,using the average wage of the manufacturing industry to eliminate the price factors as a measure of the labor cost,this paper empirically analyses the influence of the change of labor cost on the quality of the export products of China's manufacturing industry in the 2002-2011 years.According to the calculation results,the overall export quality of Chinese manufacturing industry has experienced a process of rising first,then decreasing and rising again in the past 2002-2011 years.According to the empirical analysis,the effect of labor cost on the quality of the export products of the manufacturing industry is regulated by labor productivity.In the case of higher labor productivity,labor cost has a promoting effect on export products,and conversely,it has a restraining effect.The empirical results show that the labor cost has a negative effect on the quality of the export products of the manufacturing industry as a whole and the low technology manufacturing industry,and it has a positive effect on the high-tech manufacturing industry and the medium technology manufacturing industry.It shows that the overall labor productivity of our manufacturing industry is not high,but the labor productivity of the middle and high technology manufacturing industry is relatively high.Finally,according to the empirical and calculation results,we put forward some policy recommendations for improving the quality of China's export products.