进口中间品质量与企业生产率:基于中国制造业企业的研究

文章基于2000-2006年中国工业企业数据和海关贸易数据,测算了进口中间品质量和企业全要素生产率,并深入分析了进口中间品产品质量对中国制造业企业全要素生产率的影响。多种计量方法的分析结果表明:进口中间品产品质量显著促进了企业生产率的提升。异质性分析的结果表明,进口中间品产品质量对加工贸易企业、外资企业的生产率提升作用显著大于其他贸易方式和所有制类型的企业;不管企业是从非OECD国家进口,还是从OECD国家进口,中间品产品质量的提升都可促进企业生产率的提高;相比高质量的进口中间品,低质量的进口中间品不能提高企业的生产率。进一步的分位数回归结果表明,相比高生产率企业,低生产率企业能够从进口中间品质量中获益更多,全面提高进口中间品质量可以自动地缩小企业间生产率水平的差距。

The Quality of Imported Intermediate Product and Firm Productivity: Evidence from China's Manufacturing Firms

This paper uses matching data from China's import and export database and the Chinese industrial enterprise database in 2000-2006 to measure the quality of imported intermediate goods and the total factor productivity of firms. On this bases, the paper further investigates the influential effect of quality of imported intermediate goods on the total factor productivity of Chinese manufacturing enterprises. Firstly, the paper uses the Ordinary Least Square (OLS) and the Feasible Generalized Least Square (FGLS) to test the impact and find that the quality of imported intermediate goods of Chinese enterprises has a significant positive impact on the total factor productivity. Secondly, distinguishing the heterogeneity of companies and imported intermediate goods, the empirical results remain the same in general; furthermore, the results based on heterogeneity of firms show that the promotion of quality of imported intermediate goods on the processing trade firms' and foreign firms' total factor productivity is significantly higher than firms of other types of ownership and trade way; additionally, by analyzing the influence based on the heterogeneity of imported intermediate goods,we find that the imported intermediate goods from both the OECD countries and non OECD countries can improve the total factor productivity of firms;specifically, compared with the higher quality of imported intermediate goods, the lower quality of imported intermediate goods can not improve the total factor productivity of firms. Thirdly, in order to solve the potential endogenous problem, referring to the existing literature, this paper constructs the instrumental variables of the quality of imported intermediate goods by two methods, and adopts Two Stage Least Square (2SLS) and two step system Generalized Method of Moments (GMM) to re-regression, the results of regression show that the symbol and significant level of the main variables do not change too much, indicating that the previous regression results are basically stable; in addition, to further ensure the robustness of the regression results, this paper also uses the methods different from the previous method to re-calculate the quality of imported intermediate goods and the total factor productivity of firms, and repeat the previous benchmark regression, the results show that improving the quality of imported intermediate goods can help Chinese manufacturing enterprises to increase the total factor productivity, which means that the previous regression results are still stable. Finally, the paper also uses the quantile regression method for extending analysis, and the results of quantile regression show that, compared with the firms of higher productivity, the firms of lower productivity can get more benefits from the quality of imported intermediate goods, improving the quality of imported intermediate goods can automatically reduce productivity gap among firms. The conclusion will provide the more credible empirical support for the above explanation, and this paper will not only provide evidences based on Chinese micro-data regarding the relationships between the quality of imported intermediate goods and the total factor productivity and enriches the related literatures, but also the abundant policy meanings for the trade structure reform.