Does Export Affect Productivity

As one of the three major promotions that drive economic growth,export trade has been highly recognized from national strategy aspect since the reform and opening up.Especially after China joined WTO a member in the year of 2001,China's economic development has been largely depending on export trade due to export orientation policy and industrial enterprises has achieved outstanding performance in international market.Thus,his paper will look into the issue of how export trade has affected the productivity of industrial enterprises on the basis of available micro level data and focus on two dimensions,that is if industrial enterprises in China has acquired the 'Learning by Exporting Effect',that is whether export trade has a positive impact on industrial enterprises' productivity promotion or not and the heterogenicity of 'Learning by Exporting Effect',that is how initial productivity affects this learning effect.This paper is divided into six sections.The first section will briefly introduce the research background including the correlation between export trade and enterprise productivity and the usage of trade weighted average tariff rate as an instrument of export volume,and then present a technology roadmap to show the research structure and process and list two expected innovations.The second section will firstly comb the developing international trade theory from classic trade theory to new trade theory,then to new-new trade theory concerning productivity,secondly review and sort the existing empirical literatures according to the differences in countries' economic development level and export destinations,finally summarize the research contribution they have made and propose the motivation to investigate a research respect lack of concentration.The third section will provide a description of the characteristics of export trade and enterprise productivity distribution.It is implied that the regional export structure and export commodity structure has improved whilst witnessing the rapid increase of export volume.The average productivity enterprises that participate in export trade is higher than domestic oriented enterprises,yet the problem of whether the higher productivity derives from participation in export trade remains for further inspection.The fourth section will give a deduction of theoretical model to verify the conclusion that not all enterprises can gain productivity growth from exporting,that is,new exporters' productivity growth decreases as theris initial productivity rises while old exporters' productivity growth is not affected by theris initial productivity,then econometrics regression models are formed on this base.The fifth section presents results of the econometrics regression models with fixed effect,instrumental variable and robust test after illustration of data processing and variable specification.The results show that export volume has positive relation to enterprise productivity and export trade has promoted the growth of enterprise productivity.For newly export enterprises,their productivity growth is negatively related with their initial productivity while this relationship doesn't exist within old exporters.As for difference in main export destinations,enterprises that mainly export commodity to developed countries and regions acquire more significant 'Learning by Exporting' effect than those mainly export to developing countries and regions.The sixth section will summarize the findings and conclusions of this paper and accordingly put forward suggestions on policy and strategy.At last,shortage of this paper and future research prospect are presented.