Research On The Effect Of Technical Gap On Export Product Quality

Since the reform and opening up, China’s export products have been selling well overseas relying on the price advantage. However, in the recent ten years, along with the anti-dumping, anti-subsidy coming from foreign countries on China’s export products and the gradual rising cost of domestic labor&rising raw material, the price advantage of China’s export products is greatly affected. In this context, research on China’s export product quality upgrading is quite necessary and urgent. Export products quality upgrading can not only solve the above problems effectively, but also help to improve and optimize the economic benefits of foreign trade, China’s export structure and industrial structure upgrading.However, owing to the product quality being difficult to measure and the difficulty of relevant micro-data obtaining, the problem of China’s export products upgrading has been researched rarely by now. Some scholars study the structural changes of China’s export products from the export of technical complexity perspective, some scholars focus on the changes of our export products structure from the export of two-dimensional marginal point. Different from the most existing literatures, this paper studies China’s export product quality upgrading from the technology gap perspective. What needs to point out is that export sophistication and export product quality is not the same, the former emphasizes the technological content of export products, while the latter focuses on the study of export products quality. These are two different dimensions to measure China’s export structure upgrading. This paper attempts to answer the following questions:first, whether technology gap has influenced on China’s export product quality upgrade? If any, are there any conditions which limit the effect of technological gap on export quality? How to improve the quality of export products in our country from technological gap perspective? About the measure of the quality of export products, this paper uses adjusted export quality index to measure the level of export product quality level. Export quality index divides the price of export products into two parts including quality factors and not containing quality factor, considers the effect of each factor on the quality of export products and its incorporation of econometric model, and uses the method of iterative approximation to final estimate accurately the quality of export products. The main advantage of export quality index is that it overcomes effectively the defects of the measure the quality of export products with export prices, the estimation method is reasonable and accurate, and can measure the quality level of products on a country industry level. The main problem is that it has a very strict assumption (which assumes that the export product quality varies linearly with time), this assumption may not conform to the actual situation. In the light of this question, by using the function chain neural network, this paper obtains the adjusted quality index of export products in each industry of our country manufacturing industry.In the structure arrangement, this paper includes seven chapters. The basic structure and main contents are as follows:the first chapter is the introduction, mainly introduces the writing background and significance, research contents, research structure, research methods and innovative points. The second chapter is a literature review which is divided into five parts. First part carries on the review to the quality measure of export products, followed by a literature review on the export product quality related theory researches, the third part is the review of empirical research literature about export quality upgrading, and then to remark on the Chinese export product quality upgrading, finally this chapter gives the literature summary. The third chapter is the theoretical analysis about the technology gap with the export product quality theory, which is divided into four parts. The first part is the mechanic analysis about the effect of technology gap on export product quality; the second part is the quality-improved economic growth model which reaches a nonlinear relations conclusion about technology gap and export quality; the third part is on the dynamic evolution trend of technology gap on the impact of the export product quality; last part is the summary of this chapter. The fourth chapter is the measure on China’s export product quality. This chapter firstly introduces the existing literature about the measure method of export products quality, then points out their insufficiency, and then introduces the export product quality index measurement framework and uses the function chain neural network to carry on the reasonable correction. At last, by using the modified export product quality index, this paper estimates China’s export product quality about28manufacturing industries. The fifth chapter is the empirical test on the nonlinear relationship between technology gap and the quality of export products. First of all, we use three different methods to calculate the level of technical gap, then performs the nonlinear empirical analysis; secondly, to further clarify the role of technology gap, we join the interaction term about technology gap and foreign investment in the measurement model; then, in order to enhance the robustness of the empirical results, the endogenous test is done, after handling the endogenous variable effectively, the existence of the nonlinear relationship between technology gap and export product quality is verified again; finally, according to several indicators such as technology gap, source of foreign investment, foreign investment form, trade patterns and factor intensity, the large sample are divided into few sub sample to examine and analysis the robustness of above conclusions. Large sample and sub sample results all verify the nonlinearity existence of the technology gap on the quality of export products in most manufacturing industry of our country industry. The sixth chapter is based on the empirical analysis conclusion about the fifth chapter. Its aim is to test the existence of threshold effect about technology gap on China’s export product quality. The test results show that there exists a threshold effect on China’s manufacturing export product quality. Then, the endogenous grouping is done according to the threshold value. The test results show that the effect of technology gap, in the small and large samples, on China’s export product quality is weak; in the moderate group, the technology gap can significantly promote China’s export product quality upgrading. The study also found that the influence of the proportion of FDI and domestic R&D level on of the quality of export products are subject to technology gap. After studying the influence of technology gap on China’s export product quality, this paper classifies the domestic R&D (the domestic R&D includes R&D investment of the material capital and R&D investment in human capital), investigate the influence of domestic research on China’s export product quality from the experience level. The results show that:domestic R&D has obvious "substitution effect" on technology gap in the small technology gap group; in the moderate group, there exists a significant "crowding out" effect on R&D from technology gap; in the big technology gap group, the contribution of R&D in material capital investment is bigger than that of R&D in human capital. The seventh chapter is the conclusion and policy meaning. Based on the summarizing on the theoretical and empirical analysis results, combined with the current manufacturing industry development situation and attracting foreign investment, the corresponding policy recommendations on China’s export product quality upgrading are proposed.