| Although the traditional comparative advantage built by cheap labor is still the basic driving force for China’s manufacturing exports,at the same time,China must face the dilemma caused by the big country’s industrial return strategy,the loss of labor low-cost advantage and the excess capacity of some traditional industries.Therefore,China urgently needs to seek a new source of power to maintain the status of a big manufacturing country and gradually realize the great goal of becoming a strong manufacturing country.The rise of new institutional economics has allowed scholars widely to recognize that intangible elements such as institutional innovation can also constitute a country’s comparative advantage and have a major impact on the development of foreign trade.From the perspective of institution,this paper integrates formal and informal systems into the analytical framework,and comprehensively examines the impact of institutional quality and institutional distance on manufacturing exports to explore new development drivers that promote the expansion of manufacturing exports and optimization of export structure.Firstly,based on the theory of transaction costs,this paper analyzes the impact mechanism of political,economic,legal and cultural institution on Chinese manufacturing exports.Secondly,starting from the connotation of the system and combining the existing literature practices,this paper builds a set of institutional index system including 17 secondary indicators.The principal component analysis method was used to measure the institutional quality level of 136 countries from 2002 to 2016.And this paper uses the Kogut-Singh distance index calculation formula to measure the institutional distance between China and 67 trading partners.Then,according to the institutional quality of each country and export data,the institutional dependence of each manufacturing industry is measured.And the status quo of China’s manufacturing exports is analyzed from the three levels of total amount,industry structure and geographical structure.On this basis,the extended gravity model is used to empirically analyze the impact of institutional quality and institutional distance on China’s manufacturing exports from three dimensions:scale,various institutional factors and industry structure.Finally,based on the research results,the corresponding countermeasures and suggestions are put forward.The results of this paper indicate that:(1)In general,with the continuous advancement and deepening of reforms,China’s institutional system has been largely optimized and improved,but there is still room for improvement compared with developed countries.In addition,most of the countries with a small institutional distance from China are developing countries,while those with a large distance from China are developed countries.(2)The improvement of the quality of China’s system is conducive to the expansion of the export scale of the manufacturing industry,while the institutional distance has a certain hindrance to the export of the manufacturing industry.The effect of the quality of the legal system and the distance of the cultural system on the export of the manufacturing industry are bigger than others.(3)The improvement of the quality of China’s institution has the greatest promotion effect on the export of medium and high-tech industries,while it has the least impact on the export of low-tech industries,indicating that the improvement of the quality of the institution quality can optimize the manufacturing export structure to a certain extent. |
