Research On The Impact Of Trade Structure Of Chinese Imported Commodities On Direction Of Technical Change

China is currently in a critical period of economic transition. The readjustment of economic structure and technological Progress are China’s only way to intensive growth mode.The economic structural adjustment must be accompanied by the adjustment of technical structure. As a result, the direction of technological progress is very important for China’s economic development. The previous literatures have used the theory of directed Technological progress to account for many important economic phenomenon, such as factor income distribution or the decline of labor income share, skill premium and the direction of environmental technological progress. However, there are few literatures about how the directed technological progress is affected. The technological improvement of developing countries is mostly promoted by Independent research and development and technology import. It is obvious that technology import has become the main way to promote technological progress in China, which can keep China enjoying the advantage of backwardness.Using the technology spillover effect embodied in the import of intermediate product as an entry point, the paper will study the import trade structure of China and its biased effect on technological progress from the perspective of developing country. Several problems need to be figured out in this paper such as: how does import trade structure affect directed technological progress? What is the characteristic of mport trade structure and directed technological progress in China? Whether and how does import trade structure affect the China’s directed technological progress? What is the direction and strategy of adjusting the import trade structure? The main contents and main conclusions in this study are concluded as follows:Firstly, the paper develops a model of production and research and comes up with a generalized measuring method of biased technological progress,which is used to reveal the numerical relationship between trade structure of inter-mediate goods imports and biased technological change by employing comparative static analysis and dynamic analysis.The results show that trade structure of intermediate goods have a positive effect on biased technological change in the short-term, while the positive effect is restricted by the relative rates of technological improvements of two sectors and the growth rate of technical progress within the sector; In the long-term, import trade structure of intermediate goods have an increasable negative effect on biased technological change. Though import trade structure of consumer goods won’t directly affect biased technological change, it will indirectly affect biased technological change through the price effect.Secondly, based on classification standard of BEC, the paper reveals the trade structure characteristics of Chinese import that the share of import of intermediate goods is the highest and the share of capital goods and consumer goods are similar whose dynamic change regularity are inverse.Based on classification standard of SITC, it is revealed that the share of capital-intensive product import is higher than the share of labour-intensive product import from the trade structure characteristics of Chinese import. Based on classification standard of SITC and BEC, the paper reveals the trade structure characteristics of Chinese import of capital goods, intermediate goods and consumer goods from the perspective of factor input: It finds that the import trade structure of capital goods fluctuate wildly andshows an change in inverted U-shaped, the import trade structures of intermediate goods and consumer goods are similar and both show a change in M-shape.The research on endogenous import trade structure finds that: Import trade structure will be affected by the external factors and structural factors on different sides and degrees. The external factors above are such as international economic environment, level of domestic economy development, level of exchange rate, intellectual property protection. The structural factors above are such as industrial structure, comparative advantage, FDI, domestic demand, policy orientation,directed technological progress and export. The reasons of China’s import trade structure are:(1)Export is the main factor accounting for high proportion of intermediate goods.(2)China’s comparative advantage determines high proportion of import of capital-intensive product.(3)Directed technological progress dominates the evolvement rule of import trade structure.( 4) Industrial structure is the principal factor of import trade structure of intermediate goods and export trade structure of consumer products is a secondary factor of that.(5)The import trade structure of consumer goods essentially depends on structure of domestic demand.Thirdly, in accordance with the theory of cointegration and the Error Correction model,this paper measures the relationship between relative factor-augmenting technology progress and the import trade structures of capital goods, intermediate goods and consumer goods and the structure of R&D. The results show that the relative factor-augmenting technology progress is promoted by the import trade structure of capital goods and intermediate goods and hindered by the structure of R&D and import structures of consumer goods in short term,which is promoted by the structure of R&D and import structures of consumer goods and hindered by import structures of intermediate goods and weakly affected by the import structures of capital goods in long term.Fourthly, the paper has made a deeper analysis of the directed technological progress and other factors using granger causality tests and variance analysis. The main conclusions show as follows:(1)Long-term causal relationships among variables are more significant than short-term causality relationships. The import trade structure of capital goods and that of intermediate goods are long-term granger Causality of biased technological progress.(2)The influence factors of directed technological progress ranked by influence in descending order are: import trade structure of consumer goods, structure of R&D, import trade structure of intermediate goods and import trade structure of capital goods.