| Since China's accession to the WTO,China has actively promoted the reform of trade liberalization,especially the area of the import of intermediate goods.The intermediate tariff has dropped from 12.4%in2000 to the 6.7%in current,and the decline rate has been reached 45.9%.At the same time,the―Government Work Report‖pointed out that more active import policies should be implemented,such as the expansion of imports of advanced technology equipment in recent years.This shows that China is entering the new stage of trade liberalization of intermediate inputs.However,this is not compatible with the fact that many regions in China have relatively large gaps such as economic level and government's ability to govern.This has led to obvious regional differences in institutional environment.So how does this influence the firms?In particular,will it influence the competitiveness of firms?Because the markup reflects the ability of companies to maintain prices above the marginal cost,the ability to maintain a high markup is an important manifestation of the company's competitiveness[1].Therefore,the aim of this paper is to study the effects of liberalization of intermediate inputs and institutional environment on the competitiveness of firms by using markup as the research perspective.This paper first sorts out the related research about markup and the related theoretical and empirical research on trade liberalization and markup,institutional environment and firms'behavior.Then it describes the influence mechanism of trade liberalization of intermediate inputs and institutional environment on markup.The influence mechanism is used as the theoretical support of this paper.In addition,this paper also features a description of the Chinese realities of markup,trade liberalization of intermediate inputs and institutional environment.Finally,this paper use enterprise micro-data and product tariff data from 2000 to 2007 to deeply study the impact of trade liberalization of intermediate inputs and institutional environment on markup.The results of this paper indicate that trade liberalization of intermediate inputs and the improvement of the institutional environment have significantly increased the markup of firms.Further,this paper also discusses the effects of liberalization of intermediate inputs and institutional environment on markup of different types of firms.After distinguishing the ownership type and export status of enterprises,the results show that the lower tariffs on intermediate goods have a greater impact on markup of foreign-funded firms and non-export firms and the improvement of the institutional environment have a positive effect on markup of state-owned and export firms.In addition,the impact of trade liberalization of intermediate inputs and institutional environment on markup is also significantly different due to differences in regional distribution and factor concentration.The conclusions of this paper provide rich policy implications for vigorously advancing the reform of trade liberalization and improving the regional institutional environment. |
