The Upstream Degree Of Trade And The Quality Of Export Products:Theoretical Mechanism And Empirical Analysis

"New pattern" and "steady development" have become the key words of China’s economic development since 2020.With rising labor costs and intensifying international competition,my country’s reform and opening-up dividends,which are quickly released by price advantages,are gradually converging,and the "low-price,high-volume" export model is about to be eliminated.In the face of new challenges,we need to give new methods to win with stability.Improving the quality of export products is the core way to change the growth mode of foreign trade and optimize the export industrial structure.Pursuing "low price and high quality" is the key to improving trade competitiveness in the new era and realizing a new round of foreign trade-driven high-quality economic development.At present,research on the improvement path of export product quality is not uncommon,including demand,supply,capital,policy,trade liberalization and other perspectives.However,the direct impact of the division of labor in the global value chain is relatively ignored.In the context of economic globalization,the development of international vertical specialization and outsourcing trade has realized the global value chain benefit division mode of trade integration and non-integration of production,and the development of export trade must be integrated into the global industrial chain division of labor.The promotion effect of the global value chain will undoubtedly bring historical opportunities to the development of my country’s export trade.In 2020,China’s import and export volume exceeded 4.6 trillion US dollars,accounting for 14.7 percent of the international market share.China’s trade volume in both goods and services has become the largest in the world.However,on the one hand,the low-end embedded mode with the advantage of factor cost will inevitably bring hidden dangers to the sustainable development of my country’s foreign trade;on the other hand,developed countries import advanced production equipment and high-quality key components to my country,As a result,local enterprises in our country are dependent on exogenous technology,encounter the capture effect of value chain embedding,and fall into the dilemma of "low-end lock-in".The "double-edged sword" characteristic of global value chains makes it a topic that needs to be discussed how enterprises embedded in global value chains will affect product quality.The highly refined production links enable enterprises to be embedded in the industrial chain of export and import markets at the same time.Although limited literatures also focus on the global value chain perspective to study the effect mechanism of enterprises’ participation in the division of labor of industrial chain on the quality of export products,they ignore the differences between enterprises’ involvement in the division of labor of export and import markets.In view of this,supported by the existing literature,this paper based on the theory of international division of labor theory,embedded network,based on trade upstream degree Angle,upstream upstream from export and import and trade upstream degrees from three aspects,embedded into the export market of the enterprise,import and the domestic market to conduct a comprehensive and export product quality upgrade path research both differences.Specifically,the trade upstream degree is brought into the framework of Dixit-Stiglitz monopoly competition,and the proposition hypothesis is put forward based on theoretical analysis.At the same time,in line with the rigor of the research,the thesis hypothesis proposed in the paper is tested in detail and rigorously quantitatively by using China industrial enterprise database and Customs database.The main conclusions of this paper are as follows: First,through descriptive analysis,compared with other countries,China’s overall and manufacturing industry has a higher level of upstream,and continues to move up the chain.On the whole,the quality of export products is still in the middle and lower reaches of the manufacturing industry.Secondly,the upstream degree of trade has a significant impact on the quality of enterprises’ export products.The improvement of the upstream degree of enterprises’ export can improve the total factor productivity of enterprises through the scale effect of labor force and intermediate product input,the type of imported products,the quality of products and the spillover effect of product technology,and realize the quality upgrade of export products.The upstream degree of import has an inverted U-shaped relationship with the quality of manufacturing enterprises’ export products,which mainly affects the quality of manufacturing enterprises’ export products through the type effect of imported products,technology spillover effect,total factor productivity and r&d efficiency.The trade upstream distance can also improve the export quality of manufacturing enterprises by increasing the investment intensity of fixed assets,improving the total factor productivity of enterprises and alleviating the financing constraints of enterprises.Thirdly,the distance effect of export upstream degree,import upstream degree and trade upstream degree all have the difference of enterprise trade mode,ownership and technology type.Fourth,the upstream industry data characteristics of index,based on the micro data aggregation areas-medium industry level data,export and trade upstream degrees from upstream industry to promote regional configuration effect-mainly through resource export product quality upgrading,and imports the upstream degree on the quality of the region-industry exports showed inhibition effect.