| The "ZTE Incident" not only ignites China’s passion,determination and courage to innovate independently,but also deeply exposes the long-term dilemma that China lacks independent innovation capabilities.In the global product space,it is the sign of China’s future high-quality economic development to effectively drive the leap and upgrade of products by accumulating of capabilities and technologies,increasing product complexity,and improving China’s position in the global product space.However: First,the product space theory studies the evolution of export technical complexity from a macro perspective,but this theory lacks sufficient attention to enterprises,as the microscopic decision-making body,so the product space theory is inevitably questioned by the lack of micro-foundations;Second,as a large developing country,China not only needs to overcome own market distortion to improve product complexity,but also face technological pressure from developed countries such as the United States.The "United States Innovation and Competition Act of 2021" has raised this suppression to law level,and the "Holding Foreign Companies Accountable Act" passed unanimously by the United States Securities Regulatory Commission(SEC)has expanded the suppression to the financial level.The development of stuck neck products must be subsidized by government policies;Third,the government subsidies for the increase in product complexity are not prohibited subsidies,but actionable subsidies for R&D activities.Therefore,this article decomposes the macro-export technical complexity to the micro-enterprise level,and explore the influence mechanism of government subsidy policy on the enterprise export technical complexity from the aspect of enterprise innovation.First of all,this paper expands the Romer endogenous growth model to build a six-sector endogenous technology progress model that includes the final product production sector,intermediate product production sector,R&D sector,government sector,financial sector,and consumer sector.Through the solution and analysis of the equilibrium state,we explore the influence mechanism of subsidies on the export technical complexity.Considering that the international commodity market,factor market,and technology market have never been fair competition markets,China’s key core technological innovation is bound to face strong pressure from technologically monopolized developed countries.Government sector is added to the endogenous growth model to highlight the government’s role of supporting industrial upgrading.Given that China’s financial market is imperfect,the R&D sector relies on the financing function to carry out R&D activities,so the financial sector is added to the model to fund the R&D sector,at the same time,the consumer sector is added to the model to reflect the intertemporal consumption issues.The conclusion of the model shows that subsidies can increase export technical complexity through R&D incentives and alleviation of financing constraints.In an open economy,China is facing a non-neutral(different standards from developed countries)background in the formulation and implementation of international technology market rules,this paper explores the effectiveness of subsidies on innovation incentives,and will provide a solid micro-foundation for the theory of economic development in developing countries.Second,we measure the product complexity index by the Method of Reflections,then,construct the export technical complexity index at Chinese enterprise level and conduct the statistical analysis.At first,based on the detailed export data of each country for each HS6-digit coded product provided by the BACI International Trade Database,we construct a country-product two-dimensional logical matrix,and use the Method of Reflections to calculate the product complexity.The results show that the lack of product heterogeneity is an important reason that restricts the increase in the export technical complexity;Then,considering that the same products exported by different countries may have intra-product quality differences,this article uses the ’ quality multiplier’’ to capture product quality differences,revises export technical complexity at Chinese product level,and calculates the export technical complexity index of Chinese enterprises by averaging the product complexity it exports.We obtain 833594 sets of samples from 2000 to 2013 by matching the Chinese industrial enterprise database and the customs database.This paper makes up for the limitation of the lack of micro-subjects and the inability to analyze the behavior of micro-subjects in measuring the macro complexity directly by products by builds a complete analysis chain of ’ products-enterprises-countries’ ’.Third,we assess the effect of subsidies on enterprise export technical complexity.This paper employs the ordinary least squares method to test the effect of subsidies on enterprise export technical complexity,and adopts the two-stage least squares method and the Heckman two-step method to conduct robustness tests.Then,we use the threshold model to verify the threshold effect of subsidies,and the results show that moderate subsidies can promote enterprises export technical complexity,while excessive subsidies will inhibit the technical complexity by weakening R&D incentives and increasing rent-seeking costs.Lastly,we use the three-stage intermediary effect test model to verify the influence mechanism of subsidies on the enterprise export technical complexity,and prove that subsidies promote the enterprise export technical complexity through the financing constraint mitigation mechanism and R&D investment incentive mechanism.This paper creatively adopts the enterprise export technical complexity as the evaluation index of innovation performance,which not only makes up for the shortcomings of existing innovation investment,patents and other indicators that do not fall on the final product of the enterprise,but also covers the information on the position changes in the global export product space,and makes up for the lack of new product output that cannot reveal the specific direction of product technological progress.Finally,this article expands the research perspective,goes deep into the product level,and discusses the influence mechanism of subsidies on the enterprise export technical complexity under the product switching behavior.First,we identify the product switching behavior through Python programming based on the export product coding data of the same company in different years,and perform statistical analysis on different types of product switching to show their distribution characteristics;Second,we adopt the Probit model and the Zero-inflated negative binomial model to verify the effect of subsidies on product switching behavior,and find that subsidies may promote the new products adding while restraining the exit of existing products;Third,by adding the interaction term between subsidies and product switching in the regression equation,we explore the influence mechanism of government subsidies on the enterprises export technical complexity at the product level,and find that subsidies can increase the complexity by stimulating new product adding behaviors.This empirical study expands the perspective of export technical complexity to the perspective of product switching.This article innovatively introduces the perspective of Product switching in the research on the complexity of enterprise export technology,and further explores the influence mechanism of government subsidies on the complexity of enterprise export technology from the perspective of new product innovation and exit of existing products.At the same time,the ’ dual nature’’ of government subsidies to encourage new product innovation and to prevent the exit of existing products is verified.Conclusions and prospects of this article: First,the conclusion of the influence mechanism of government subsidies on export technical complexity is that ’ subsidies could promote enterprise export technical complexity through the mechanism of mitigating financing constraints and encouraging R&D investment’’,which will provide a theoretical basis for China to adjust industrial incentive policies and strengthen the effective cooperation between industrial policies and financial markets;Second,the conclusion that ’ China’s export products are more diverse,but the overall product heterogeneity is not strong,which will restrict China’s export technical complexity’’ will provide a basis for the Chinese government to formulate policy measures to accelerate the transformation from scale expansion to quality and efficiency improvement;Third,the empirical research on the nonlinear impact of subsidies on enterprise export technical complexity is that ’ appropriate subsidies can promote enterprise export technology complexity,while excessive subsidies will inhibit the export technology complexity of enterprises by weakening R&D incentives and increasing rent-seeking costs’ ’,which will leave exploration opportunities for the further exploration of’ stuck neck’’ products in the global export product space and the establishment of scientific and reasonable policy support space;Fourth,the dynamic conversion conclusion of product switching reveals that government subsidies can promote enterprises to add new products while restraining the exit of existing products.This mechanism reflects the ’ dual nature’’ of the subsidy policy,and will provide exploration space for further exerting its new product incentive function and strengthening other policies to reduce the function of restraining the withdrawal of backward products,and to study the optimal policy combination. |
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