| In recent years,international trade protectionism and unilateralism,represented by frequent tax increases in the United States and the hard Brexit of the United Kingdom,have gradually heated up.For our country,the trade conflict between China and the United States,the global new crown epidemic has not yet subsided,and our country is in the stage of economic structural transformation,in the face of such a volatile international trade,economic and health external environment,our government inevitably needs to introduce a variety of trade policies for moderate regulation,the frequent adjustment of the policy represents the increase of trade policy uncertainty,which in turn has an impact on the behavior and decision-making of micro-enterprises The frequent policy adjustments represent an increase in trade policy uncertainty,which in turn has an impact on the behavior and decisions of micro enterprises.The Fifth Plenary Session of the 19th CPC Central Committee pointed out that "adhering to the central position of innovation in the overall situation of China’s modernization" shows China’s determination to use innovation as the support for development.The manufacturing industry is the main battlefield to improve the innovation ability,and it is also the main body of the real economy,which is responsible for promoting economic transformation and realizing high-quality development.Therefore,in order to successfully achieve the innovation-driven goal,we have to firmly grasp the main line of manufacturing innovation and overcome the shortcomings and deficiencies that exist in China at present.Therefore,against such a background,it is particularly important and urgent to study and examine the causes and mechanisms of the impact of trade policy uncertainty on the innovation of China’s manufacturing enterprises in order to promote the improvement of their innovation capability.In this paper,we firstly comb through the existing literature and find that most of the studies on trade policy uncertainty are focused on the binary margins of import and export,enterprise productivity and product profitability,etc.There are relatively few studies on innovation,and most of the research methods are limited by the measurement methods of trade policy uncertainty,focusing on the empirical analysis using the DID multiplicative difference model in the context of China’s WTO accession.Most of the existing literature focuses on internal management and financial characteristics,and most of the macroscopic studies are conducted from the perspective of economic policies,and very few studies are conducted from the perspective of trade policies.Secondly,this paper introduces the theory related to the impact of trade policy uncertainty on corporate innovation,and then gives a theoretical explanation of how trade policy uncertainty affects the conduct of corporate innovation activities in China based on the proposed theory,and uses it to put forward the hypothesis of this paper.Based on this,a theoretical heterogeneity analysis is further conducted based on the nature of enterprise property rights,location and industry,and the hypotheses on the second level of this paper are proposed accordingly.Again,this paper defines the concepts of explanatory and explanatory variables,introduces the measurement method,and analyzes the current situation of trade policy uncertainty and enterprise innovation of manufacturing listed companies,and finds that the overall trend of China’s trade policy uncertainty index has been on the rise since 2008,with the highest trade policy uncertainty index in 2019;in terms of enterprise innovation it is found that manufacturing listed companies The number of patent applications of listed manufacturing enterprises has shown an upward trend in recent years,but the growth rate has slowed down,the layout of the key areas of innovation of China’s manufacturing enterprises does not account for a high proportion of global patents,and the independent innovation capability of manufacturing industry is still relatively backward compared with some developed countries,and there is still a long way to go to further improve the innovation capability of Chinese manufacturing enterprises.Then this paper uses the annual unbalanced panel data of China’s A-share manufacturing listed companies from 2007-2017,and constructs a fixed-effects model using the China Trade Policy Uncertainty Index constructed by Huang and Luk(2019)as the explanatory variables of this paper to empirically analyze how rising trade policy uncertainty will affect the innovation of China’s manufacturing enterprises.The findings show that,firstly,trade policy uncertainty significantly inhibits the innovation activities of manufacturing firms.Second,the results based on the enterprise heterogeneity test show that there are some differences in the inhibition of trade policy uncertainty on different manufacturing enterprises,specifically,the inhibition of non-state-owned enterprises is greater than that of state-owned enterprises;the inhibition of enterprises in the eastern region will be stronger than that of enterprises in the central and western regions;the inhibition of high-tech manufacturing enterprises is significantly greater than that of non-high-tech manufacturing enterprises.Third,the results of the mechanism test indicate that the stronger financing constraints and the increased financialization level of firms will strengthen the inhibitory effect of trade policy uncertainty on the innovation activities of manufacturing firms.Finally,based on the findings of the theoretical and empirical analysis,the government should try its best to maintain the overall stability and continuity of trade policy,speed up the negotiation with the U.S.side to reduce trade frictions,actively implement the "Belt and Road" policy to conduct free trade with more countries,make full use of the domestic market to promote consumption upgrading,and further improve the financial market.In addition,it is recommended to further improve the financial market.Enterprises should seize the opportunity to make good use of the various policies proposed by the state to improve their independent research and development capabilities,flexibly establish domestic and international marketing channels,and prevent excessive financialization of enterprises.The innovations of this paper are,first,the theoretical extension of the research related to trade policy uncertainty and the research on the macro-influencing factors of enterprise innovation.Second,in terms of indicator selection,unlike the previous use of the tariff differential method,the text extraction method is used to select a trade policy uncertainty index with broader indicator coverage to better capture domestic and international political shocks and international macro environment fluctuations as a way to study the impact of innovation activities of manufacturing firms.Third,on top of the analysis of the basic empirical regression,financing constraints and the level of financialization of enterprises are introduced as mechanism test variables,which are combined with the previous theoretical analysis to further empirically analyze the influence mechanism.But also because of the consideration of time validity and data accessibility,more influencing factors were not tested for mechanism. |
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