The Impact Of Producer Services Import Quality On The Productivity Of Chinese Manufacturing Firms

As a pillar industry of the national economy,the scale and quality of the development of manufacturing industry have always been the key topic of academic attention.At present,China’s manufacturing industry has achieved the take-off of scale development,but it is facing the development dilemma of "large but not strong",and is in urgent need of new power sources to support and assist the manufacturing industry to complete a new round of transformation and upgrading.In particular,As the producer services independently developed from the service sector within the manufacturing industry,it can promote the productivity improvement of the manufacturing industry through the vertical correlation between the upstream and downstream of the industrial chain.However,due to the low proportion of domestic high-end producer services and the insufficient effective supply of high-quality producer services to the manufacturing industry at the present stage,it is difficult to supply the high-level producer services required by the development of the manufacturing industry solely by domestic producer services.Therefore,it is crucial to import high-quality producer services.Different from previous academic studies on the impact of the import scale of producer services on the development of manufacturing industry,this paper focuses on the measurement and analysis of the import technological sophistication of producer services,and then further explores the impact of the import quality of producer services on the productivity of manufacturing enterprises based on the current situation analysis,and through which channels the influence will play a role is also the focus of this paper.Based on the micro-data of listed manufacturing enterprises in Shanghai and Shenzhen from 2009 to 2019,this paper studies the impact of import quality of producer services on the productivity of manufacturing enterprises.The benchmark regression results show that the improvement of the import quality of producer services significantly promotes the improvement of the productivity of manufacturing enterprises,and this conclusion is still valid after alleviating the endogenous problem of the model by the instrumental variable method and various robustness tests,such as replacing the explained variable,replacing the core explanatory variable and adjusting the control variable.The mechanism test results show that the intermediate channels that the quality of producer services import affects the productivity of manufacturing enterprises are the reduction of production cost,the accumulation of human capital and the promotion of the positive development of producer services.The results of heterogeneity test show that the effect of producer services import quality on the productivity of manufacturing enterprises is significantly different due to the difference of type of import producer services,enterprises type and institutional environment.In addition,further quantile regression results show that the import quality of producer services has the greatest impact on manufacturing enterprises with middle productivity level.The research conclusion of this paper verifies the importance of services industry opening and services trade for the development of manufacturing industry to a certain extent,which is helpful for government departments to formulate targeted policies and measures to promote the differentiated development of manufacturing enterprises in different development stages under the background of institutional opening.This is of profound practical significance for promoting the transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing industry and achieving high-quality economic development.