Financing Constraints,Trade Liberalization And Import Diversification Of Enterrprises In China

The microeconomic mechanism and influencing factors of the import and export decision-making behavior are the main issues and hot topics in the field of modern international economics.The existing literature mainly focuses on the study of export behavior,based on the research of Melitz(2003)on related theories of firm heterogeneity and export relations.The theory of international trade,whose research field has gradually transferred from macro to micro decision-making mechanism of enterprises,has become the mainstream theory of enterprise import and export behavior.Based on the theory of firm heterogeneity trade,this paper further studies the micro-mechanism of import enterprises and its influencing factors.First of all,this paper analyzes the characteristics of the diversification of Chinese enterprises from three perspectives,i.e.the source of imports,the types of imported products and the relationship of import trade.The results indicate that the level of regional diversification and the level of product diversification in China are worked out as a decline trend.But to different regions,industries and ownership,the results are showed slightly different.At the same time,the paper analyzes the development status and characteristics of financing constraints of Chinese enterprises from three aspects,which includes internal finance constraints,external loans and commercial credit financing,and also detailed describes the level of financing constraints of Chinese enterprises.On the whole,Chinese enterprises are still faced with the pressure of financing constraints,there are differences in the level of corporate financing constraints in different regions and in different industries.Secondly,based on the perspective of import diversification,this paper systematically analyzes the influence of financing constraints on import behavior.This paper firstly makes a statistical analysis on the typical facts of the diversification of import in China,and then studies the influence of financing constraints on the import aspects.On average,Chinese companies import 20 kinds of products from 4 trade partners and each enterprise has 28 import trade relations.The overall diversification level of the import enterprises declines gradually.For enterprises of different ownership,import diversification level of state-owned enterprises is highest,then the foreign-funded enterprise,with private enterprise the lowest.The import diversification of state-owned enterprises is declining,yet it’s rising for the foreign and private enterprises,so the import diversification of enterprises of different ownership level is converging at some extent.According to the analysis of empirical research,the results show that the financing constraints are important limiting factors on Chinese import diversification level,and this restriction mainly runs by reducing the quantity of import products,and the limit effects are more obvious for state-owned enterprises and private enterprises.Finally,this paper uses micro-data and difference-in-difference method to run the econometric model,and find that the trade liberalization strategy in China has promoted enterprise import diversification level,but this promotion effect is on a decrease.The enhancing effect in the year 2000-2003 is greater than that in 2004-2006,which is mainly due to the decrease of the tariff cuts.It indicate the need to further advance the process of trade liberalization for the sake of trade interests,and the necessity of current promoting of the FTA strategy.The effects of trade liberalization for enterprises of different ownership are distinct:the effects of foreign-funded enterprises are more obvious than local enterprises,and more obvious to those enterprises with high production efficiency,low degree of financing constraints and government subsidies.It means that companies need to improve their productivity in order to share more policy dividends of trade liberalization.