A Study On The Effects Of International Trade On China's Technology Progress

As the rapid development of science and technology, technical progress has become a significant contributor to the development of world economy. The improvement of a nation's technology status mainly due to domestic technology innovation and various foreign technology diffusion in the process of studying, absorbing and imitating foreign knowledge. As one of the most common channels of the technology transmission and diffusion, international trade has provided the developing countries with the access to advanced technology. What's more, it helps to improve a nation's dynamic innovative capability as well as the formation of innovative mechanism through all kinds of channels. As the world's biggest developing economy, China is limited of capital and technical storage. Therefore, importing foreign advanced technology through trading activities involving new products and new technologies becomes the most effective shortcut for China to narrow its technical gap between developed nations.The thesis begins with the illustration of the research background and significance, and then it outlines the definition, types of technology progress and its functions to economic growth. After that, it reviews the relevant theories about international trade's influences on technology progress, basing on which it starts the theoretical study on the effects of trade on China's technology progress, with a thorough coverage of its mechanism, channels and influencing factors. The thesis also focuses on the current situation and existing problems or restrictions of China's technology progress. The next chapter carries out an empirical study on this issue on the background of previous analyze. In the final part, it provides some strategic suggestions on the fields of influencing factors on the basis of the results and findings in previous chapters.The study above comes to several conclusions as following: firstly, international trade plays a significant role in promoting China's technology progress; secondly, the main mechanism of trade's effects on China's technology progress are basing on technology innovation, learning curve effect and technology diffusion; thirdly, the primary influencing factors of trade's effects on China's technology progress include demostic human capital storage, domestic R&D storage, industrial clustering effects and domestic institutional structure; fourth, trade-related foreign R&D spillover contributes more to China's technology progress than domestic R&D storage, specifically the higher an industry's R&D intensity is, the bigger its contribution to technology progress.This thesis tries to achieve supporting empirical results by employing relevant economic data and proper indices system. However, it confronted great challenges in the establishing of models and indices system as well as the accessibility of data sources, which apparently affected the reliability of the finding in some degree. Addition to that, there're also some limitations in the theoretical analysis of the mechanism and influencing factors.