| Since China’s reform and opening up, China’s economy has been growing rapidly for over30years with an average growth rate of9%. Especially, export is one of the import driving forces of Chinese economic growth. In1978, China’s export was just9.57billion dollars, but it increased to1898.6billion dollars in2011, its share of total world exports rose from0.75%to10.4%. However, the regional export gap is widening:export grows fastest in the eastern region, but much slower in the median and western regions. And at the same time, China’s economy increasingly tends to geographic agglomeration, with industry development, FDI and other economic activities concentrated to the eastern region. There are all kinds of metropolis circles, and specialized industrial clusters all over China, such as the electronic and information industrial clusters in Kunshan, the clothing industrial cluster in Ningbo, the footwear industrial cluster in Wenzhou.The geographical agglomeration of economic activities has promoted the international competitiveness of regional industrial development and improved the regional export in China (Zhigang Yuan,2003; Rongxiang Jin and Weixi Zhu,2002). But how does the geographic agglomeration improve the regional comparative advantages and export growth? The academic circle does not process a clear-cut conclusion.Economists have done a lot of researches on the impact of geographic agglomeration on regional export with regional or industrial data under the framework of traditional trade theory and new trade theory for a long time and find geographic agglomeration indeed promote regional export (Krugman,1979,1980; Poter,2000). But few researches focus on the relationship between agglomeration and firm performances. In fact, geographic agglomeration is mico-economic in nature, so it first affects firm performances and then influences the regional or national economy growth. Therefore, we think it is very important to make clear the mechanism of agglomeration affecting export at the firm level for our understanding the relationship between agglomeration and export. Based on the previous studies and combing the theory of incomplete contract, corporate finance, economic geography and "new" new trade theory, this paper investigates the micro-mechanism through which geographic agglomeration affects export from the perspective of contract enforcement cost, external financing cost and technology improvement respectively. Furthermore, empirically study using data of firm data in Chinese manufacturing industries strongly support the main predictions of the theoretical models.The essay has seven parts. In the introduction, we raise out the question and briefly introduce the background, motivation, structure, contributions and shortcomings of this paper. Chapter1mainly reviews the related literatures concerning the geographic agglomeration and international trade. In chapter2, we build models to investigate the mechanism through which agglomeration may affect export in the perspectives of contract enforcement, external financing and technology improvement respectively. In chapter3,4and5, we empirically test the effect of agglomeration on firm export with Chinese manufacturing firm data and confirm all the theoretical expectations of chapter2. Chapter6breifly summarizes the dissertation and offers some policy implications.The main conclusions are:Firstly, geographic agglomeration is good for firm export and increases the export propensity and scale of firms in contract-intensive industries; secondly, agglomeration improves firms’financing environment and then significantly improve the decisions of firm export, especially those firms with high dependence on external financing; thirdly, agglomeration also promotes firms’export decision through technology and has greater positive effects on firm export in industries with higher degree of technology sophistication; finally, we find geographical agglomeration affect Chinese export mainly on its "extensive margin", and has a much less effect on its "intensive margin". |
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