Economic Policy Uncertainty,Human Capital And Export Sophistication

In today’s society with a rather unstable political and economic environment,the surge of trade protectionism,the continuous impact of COVID-19,and the recent Ukraine crisis have aggravated the uncertainty of economic policies of various countries and caused a series of impacts on normal life.In particular,in the field of international trade,in the context of rising economic policy uncertainty,we should pay attention to improving the competitive strength of export manufacturing enterprises,promoting the improvement of the technical content of export products and the leap in the complexity of export technology,so as to realize the“connotation upgrading”export trade development model.Using panel data of 27 countries or regions from 1996 to 2019,taking the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry and equipment manufacturing industry as the comparative research object,this paper aims to analyze the impact of economic policy uncertainty on the export sophistication of two different kinds of manufacturing industries.Besides,bring human capital into the research framework to explore the relationship between the three.In terms of index calculation,this paper adopts the method of Hausmann et al.（2007）to calculate the export sophistication^[1];transforms the economic policy uncertainty indicators constructed by Baker et al.（2016）into annualized index^[2].In addition,in order to fully reflect the level of human capital,this paper chooses intellectual property income and gross enrollment rate of higher education to measure human capital.Then this paper summarizes the factors that affect manufacturing export sophistication,the positive and negative impact made by economic policy uncertainty,and the mechanism of human capital promoting export sophistication.At the same time,the relationship between the three is analyzed theoretically and the corresponding hypotheses are put forward.Secondly,by constructing the fixed effect model,this paper empirically finds that in the technology-oriented pharmaceutical manufacturing industry,economic policy uncertainty can improve the level of its export sophistication,and human capital has a positive effect between them;In the capital and labor oriented equipment manufacturing industry,economic policy uncertainty will hinder the improvement of export sophistication,and the interaction effect is not significant at this time.Through grouping demonstration,the study found that there is no heterogeneity caused by the level of economic development.Later this paper constructs the differential GMM model and finds that whether in the pharmaceutical or equipment manufacturing industry,the export sophistication of the previous period will have a positive impact on the current export sophistication,which means early production and investment behavior can often be used as a reference for future development.Human capital still plays an indispensable role in it.For the reliability of the research,this paper takes the indicators of world trade uncertainty and global economic policy uncertainty as alternative variables for robust regression,and obtains similar empirical conclusions.Finally,on the basis of theoretical and empirical analysis,this paper summarizes the relationship of economic policy uncertainty,human capital and export sophistication in the pharmaceutical manufacturing industry and equipment manufacturing industry.Then put forward some suggestions to improve the export sophistication of manufacturing industry and reduce the negative impact of economic policy uncertainty.The importance of human capital is emphasized.If a country or region wants to prosper for a long time,it must pay attention to talents and vigorously develop education.