Influence Of Imported Input Quality On Total Factor Productivity Of China's Manufacturing Industry

In recent years,China's opening up has entered a new stage,which pays equal attention to import and export,introduction of foreign capital and FDI.The strategic transformation of foreign trade structure has been rapidly promoted.Affected by the policy,academia has been concerned about the role of exports to the TFP for a long time and previous related research is more in-depth.However,the import impact on TFP has always been ignored,especially research about the impact of the quality of imported inputs on TFP.In this paper,based on the UN Comtrade database,the unit value method is used to calculate the quality of imported intermediate goods and capital goods of manufacturing segments.By using data envelopment analysis(DEA),this paper estimates TFP of 28 departments in Chinese manufacturing from 2003 to 2014.While measuring the quality of imported inputs,we estimate the impact of the quality of imported inputs on manufacturing productivity with different factor intensity through fixed effects model of panel data.The possible innovations of this paper are as follows:On one hand,offer a comprehensive study of the impact of import on manufacturing TFP by taking the effect of intermediate and capital goods into account.On the other hand,the paper research the relationship between quality of imported inputs and TFP,unlike past research which pay more attention on quantities or prices of imported inputs.The empirical results show that the quality of imported intermediate goods increases China's manufacturing industry total factor productivity as well as produces substitute effect of import to R&D,and the quality of imported capital goods promotes manufacturing TFP by market size effect and effect of learning by doing;Chinese manufacturing productivity benefits from the external driving force rather than the internal one;traditional manufacturing productivity gains slow.Finally,this paper puts forward four policy suggestions.Firstly,take a different policy on intermediate goods import and take into account the short-term total factor productivity improvements and long-term sustainable development of enterprises.Secondly,improve the proportion of imported capital goods and establish an integration policy system which contain import,digestion,absorption and re-innovation.Thirdly,increase R&D input and enhance the absorptive capacity of technology spillovers on imported inputs.Finally,take active foreign capital introduction policy and ease restrictions on FDI,to guide foreign capital inflows to technical industry.