An Empirical Study On The Effect Of Import On Employment In China

Since May 2018,our country has been expanding imports on the premise of stable exports,optimizing the quality of the domestic supply system,meeting the needs of domestic consumption upgrade,realizing the development of foreign trade balance situation.Thus,whether expanding imports will impact on employment is an important consideration of assessing the economic impact.According to the classical international trade theories,such as the theory of comparative advantage and the theory of price equalization of production factors,the relationship between imports and employment is closely related,but these theories are mainly based on the hypothesis of inter-industry trade to study the relationship between trade and employment.But now,more than half of global trade is intra-industry trade and intraproduct trade.The change of trade pattern challenges the relationship between trade and employment of the classical and neoclassical trade theories.From the practice of our country,the imports of intermediate goods has been in the leading position in our country,and the import proportion of consumer goods is rising.In this context,how the sustained growth of Chinese import trade affects the level of employment is a problem to be studied in this paper.In the theoretical part,this paper summarizes the mechanism of the impact of the import trade of intermediate goods,consumer goods and capital goods on Chinese industrial employment,employment of skilled workers and employment of unskilled workers,helping to clarify how the import trade of intermediate goods,consumer goods and capital goods has an impact on Chinese industrial employment.In the empirical part,this paper selects the relevant data of China's industrial segments from 2003 to 2017 as samples,and constructs a panel model to verify the impact of import trade on the employment of skilled workers and unskilled workers from the perspective of product types of intermediate goods,consumer goods and capital goods.The empirical analysis shows that the substitution effect of the imports of intermediate goods on the overall employment,the employment of skilled workers and unskilled workers is greater than the creation effect.The imports of consumer goods have the effect of creating employment for skilled workers,but have no obvious effect on the employment of unskilled workers.The imports of capital goods have creation effect on the overall employment of the industry and the employment of non-skilled workers,while the effect on the employment of skilled workers is not significant.Therefore,the conclusion of this paper is that the import of intermediate products affects the domestic import competition sector,resulting in the compression of the profit of the industry in this competition sector,and the forced reduction of production scale,which reduces the employment of domestic skilled workers and unskilled workers.The imports of consumer goods do not have a significant impact on unskilled workers employment in our country,because the imports of consumer goods are not involved in manufacturing,the imports will not have the creation effect on the employment of unskilled workers of manufacturing industry.The imports of innovative products form a "demonstration effect" of consumption in China,the domestic enterprises imitate the new technology for production of similar products,imitating the production of innovative products increased skilled workers' employment.The imports of capital goods have a significant positive effect on the total employment of the industry,which indicates that Chinese enterprises import capital goods to expand production and establish new enterprises,thus increasing the demand for overall employment and generating employment creation effect.Finally,it is suggested that China stabilize the import of intermediate and capital goods and expand the import of consumer goods,especially innovative products in consumer goods.