The Employment Effect Of Chinese Enterprises’ Value-added Export Trade

As the world’s largest population country,employment issues are not only social issues but also economic and political issues in China.How to effectively guide employment is particularly urgent and important.With the continuous deepening of the integration of countries into the global value chain,product production has broken the tradition of manufacturing in the country and replaced it with "manufacturing in the world",and the trade type has also changed from goods trade to "task trade".The new and refined international division of labor system will undoubtedly make better use of the positive role of export trade in stimulating domestic employment.Especially for China’s processing trade,it is particularly important to consider the employment effect of export trade.Under the global value chain labor division,intermediate product and services often enter and exit country borders many times.Therefore,the traditional method of total trade overestimates country’s trade scale and benefits.Trade data based on value-added statistics can truly reflect country’s trade gains and solve the “double counting” problem.The successful compilation of multinational / world input-output tables in recent years has made it possible to calculate the value-added trade,and also provided new ideas for this article to re-examine the employment effects of China export trade.Traditional customs statistics will lead to a deviated real employment effect caused by firms’ exports.Based on the China Industrial Enterprise Database and China Customs Trade Database,this paper calculates the degree of firm participation in global value chain---domestic value-added rate(DVAR),and describes the typical facts of China’s value-added export trade and employment.In addition,based on theoretical explanations,re-exploring the employment effect of Chinese firms’ exports.The employment effects of value-added exports are further analyzed from the destination countries,product categories,and trade patterns.This paper finds that:(1)Compared with the total trade volume,the promotion of firm DVAR has a greater effect on the employment scale,and has a smaller negative impact on the employment structure.Increasing the domestic value added is more important than simply expanding the scale of exports;(2)The DVAR of firms which export to high-income countries has an obvious increase in employment scale,while a smaller negative impact on the employment structure;(3)The DVAR of firms which export final goods has the biggest increase on the employment scale,while the DVAR of firms which export intermediate products has the smallest decrease on the employment scale.The greater the product differs,the more positive effect of DVAR on employment scale,which is contrary to employment structure;(4)Compared with the general trade,the DVAR has the largest increase effect on employment scale of processing firm,and mixed trade firm DVAR has the most negative impact on the employment structure.Besides productivity,firm heterogeneity is also reflected in value-added export trade and incurred employment.Furthermore,it may be different between employment contained and incurred in value-added export at the industry level.Therefore,the labor factor content and employment incurred will be compared in the future.