Determinants And Empirical Research Of Firm’s Export Decision In China Under Diffreent Trade Types

Based on firm heterogeneity trade theory, this paper studies the determinants of firm’s export decision from both theoretical and empirical perspectives. Firstly, this paper reviews the domestic and foreign literature relating to firm heterogeneity and firms’export decision theoretically and empirically. Secondly, the paper makes some statistics description of stylized facts in firm’s export behavior and calculates firm-level TFP by using the merged data of China enterprise database and the customs database from 2002 to 2006. In addition, it analyzes distributed characteristics of firm’s export in each region, industry and ownership. Thirdly, this paper build a simple theoretical model by the method in Roberts, Tybout(1997)、Bernard, Wagner(2001) and Bernard, Jensen(2004). The model shows that firm’s export decision is influenced by heterogeneity feature in itself as well as external.Besides, based on the theoretical model, the paper employs probit model to investigate the difference of firm’s export decision between ordinary trade and processing trade by dividing trade types. The results show that sunk cost is found to be significant in two types. However, productivity presents remarkable difference. Specifically, the improvement of productivity promotes exports in ordinary trade, but it has inhibition effect in processing trade. Further, the extended heterogeneity characteristic variables’impacts on the enterprises’export is significant and robust. Among them, the firm with the sale of new products appears a strong export tendency; capital intensity has a restraining effect on firm’s export behavior; firm’s scale and average wages have a significant positive effect on export choice. From the perspective of ownership structure, some conclusions can be made. Firms have a strong export tendency under different ownership systems. In firms engaged in processing trade, state-owned enterprises and private enterprises show a negative export tendency, and the export tendency of state-owned enterprises is the weakest. Nevertheless, foreign enterprises and Hong Kong, Macao, Taiwan enterprises have a strong export tendency. Furthermore, we conduct robustness test based on the different factor endowment industry and different regions of the enterprise. And the results are generally consistent. Finally, based on the main conclusions, it gives several policy suggestions in terms of how to reduce export cost faced by each firm and how to enhance trade liberalization so as to promote firms’export activities and enhance their competitive power in international market.