| Actively expanding imports is an important way to ensure China’s high-quality economic development and promote the new pattern of “dual circulation”development.From a macro perspective,the expansion of import scale can improve a country’s product diversification and alleviate the pressure on domestic supply.In particular,the import of high-tech products can optimize the structure of the domestic product,and through technology spillover effect,learning effect,and competition effect in imports to promote the long-term economic growth of a country or region.At the same time,gains from trade have always been one of the core issues of international economics,which has received close attention from the academic community.Improving the gains from trade is also an important goal of a country’s foreign trade policy.In the framework of heterogeneous firm and monopoly competition model,gains from trade mainly come from the increase of the variety of imported products,the reallocation of resources within the industry caused by the self-selection effect,and the change of markup caused by the pro-competition effect.In-depth understanding of the gains from trade and the aspects from which imports can improve a country’s welfare gains,and on this foundation,quantitative evaluation of the gains from trade of imported firms is very important for the economic development in China.By clarifying these issues,it will help to deeply understand the import behavior of Chinese firms,and then provide empirical evidence and reference for China to stimulate the import potential in the new round of comprehensive opening-up,explore the mechanism of sustained growth of gains from trade and formulate targeted import trade policies,which has very important theoretical and practical significance.The structure of this paper is as follows: This paper is divided into eight chapters.The first chapter is the introduction,the second chapter is the literature review,the third chapter is the analysis of the development status of China’s foreign trade,the fourth to seventh chapters are the main empirical research contents,and the eighth chapter is the main conclusions,policy recommendations,and research prospects.The fourth chapter is the analysis of the global sourcing behavior and influencing factors of intermediate goods for heterogeneous firms in China.In this chapter,by constructing a heterogeneous firms’ global sourcing model of intermediate goods,which is in line with the import data of Chinese firms,it analyzes the expenditure distribution of intermediate goods from the firm and firm-product level.It is found that for these firms with the same global sourcing strategy,high productivity firms have a higher share of domestic expenditure.At the same time,this paper also finds that high productivity firms allocate more expenditure to core products,and these products often have higher quality and higher average prices.These findings give us a clearer understanding of the global sourcing behavior of Chinese firms’ intermediate goods and also provide important theoretical and empirical evidence for firms to improve their competitiveness by sourcing high-quality intermediate goods and shifting to the middle or high position of the global value chain.The fifth chapter is a quantitative analysis of the gains from trade of Chinese firms’ global sourcing of intermediate goods based on the structural model.By constructing a heterogeneous firm model including a domestic production network,this part calculates the welfare effect of global sourcing of intermediate goods at the firm,industry,and national levels.The results show that: first,the welfare effects of global sourcing of intermediate goods in the manufacturing industry and China are1.212% and 0.836% respectively.An aggregation model that ignores the firm heterogeneity and domestic production network will overestimate the welfare effects of intermediate goods global sourcing.Second,the welfare effects of intermediate goods global sourcing in different industries show great variation in China.Among them,the overall welfare gains of the high-tech industry are large,especially the welfare gains of communication equipment,computer,and other electronic equipment manufacturing industry are as high as 2.428%,while the welfare gains of food manufacturing and tobacco processing industry are only 0.640%.Third,there are significant differences in the welfare gains of intermediate products global sourcing among Chinese provinces.The welfare gains in the eastern region are significantly higher than those in the central and western regions.Among them,Shanghai,Beijing,and Guangdong have the largest welfare gains of 2.381%,1.305%,and 1.247%respectively,while Tibet,Qinghai,and Inner Mongolia have the smallest welfare gains of 0.029%,0.049%,and 0.069% respectively,which is mainly since the current industrial spatial distribution in China is excessively concentrated in the eastern region and the industrial structure in the central and western regions is not complete.Finally,the counterfactual simulation from the perspective of dual margins finds that the changes of the intensive margin and the extensive margin of the intermediate goods global sourcing are two important channels for the improvement of consumer gains.This chapter provides a new analytical perspective for accurately assessing the welfare gains of intermediate goods global sourcing and for a better understanding of the impact of trade dual margins.The sixth chapter discusses the empirical analysis of the gains from trade of input trade liberalization from the perspective of domestic value-added rate in exports.By constructing a theoretical model that takes into account the import tariff of intermediate goods and the domestic value-added rate of firms’ exports,this chapter has pioneered to elaborate from the theoretical part how the input trade liberalization promotes the increase of the domestic value-added rate of Chinese firms’ exports.Further,this chapter takes China’s accession to the WTO in 2001 as a quasi-natural experiment and uses the difference-in-differences method to find that the input trade liberalization can significantly promote the domestic value-added rate of Chinese firms’ export.In addition,the study found that the impact of input trade liberalization on firms’ DVAR is mainly achieved by embedding more upstream positions in the global value chain.Heterogeneity analysis shows that the input trade liberalization has a significant positive effect on promoting the domestic value-added rate of export of firms in the eastern region and regions with a high degree of marketization.This chapter provides empirical evidence for improving China’s gains from trade from the perspective of further broadening the field of opening up and improving the level of opening to the rest of the world,and by actively participating in the global value chain.The seventh chapter is an empirical analysis of import competition and gains from trade based on the markup.This chapter develops a model with multi-product,which improves the usual assumption that each firm produces only one product and constant markups.This paper investigates the intra-firm resources reallocation induced by import competition.The results show that: for both single-product and multi-product export firms,import competition reduces the products’ markups significantly.On the one hand,due to the core-product of multi-product export firms charging higher markups,it will reduce more during the fierce import competition;on the other hand,the "pro-competition effect" caused by import competition would induce firms to adjust the product scope by drop the product which far away from the core competitiveness,which leads to intra-firm optimal resources allocation.In addition,the markup of differentiated products is less affected by import competition than homogenized products.Finally,we also find that import competition can only influence intra-firm resources reallocation through ordinary trade,while processing trade has no these impacts.This implies that only imported products oriented to the domestic market could induce intra-firm resource reallocation.This paper has important policy implications to explain the resource reallocation among multi-product export firms and increase gains from trade of firms’ import.The eighth chapter is the main conclusions,policy recommendations,and research prospects. |
