| Since joining the WTO in 2001,China’s economy has grown rapidly and its exports have skyrocketed,remaining the world’s largest for a long time.At the same time,its low labor costs have made China the world’s leading trading nation.However,with the disappearance of the domestic demographic dividend,increasing labor supply constraints,and increasing international trade disputes(e.g.,antidumping,countervailing duties,quotas),the benefits of an export-oriented economy based on labor-intensive industries are no longer available,and it is imperative to accelerate the shift in foreign trade from "quantity expansion" to "quality improvement" It is imperative to accelerate the shift from "expansion of quantity" to "improvement of quality" in foreign trade.Against this background,this document is an important contribution to the development of an export-oriented economy.Against this background,this paper explores the relationship between demographic factors and the quality of manufacturing exports in the context of an aging population,and hopes to provide constructive suggestions for promoting the quality of China’s manufacturing exports.From a "quality" perspective,this paper examines the relationship between population aging and the quality of China’s manufacturing exports.First,we compare the literature,concepts,and theoretical foundations on population aging and export product quality to collect and analyze the current status of population aging and manufacturing export product quality.Second,we select 21 years of data from 2000 to 2020 for 30 Chinese provinces(excluding Tibet)from the China Customs database as our research data,and use Bingzhan Shi’s inverse market performance method to measure the quality of export products in each Chinese province.We then construct a nonlinear model based on the three impact paths of labor supply,labor supply quality,and demand structure,innovatively introducing a quadratic term of population aging.Using the local panel fixed effects method,a nonlinear model is constructed to study the impact of population aging on export product quality of Chinese manufacturing industries.The results show that the impact of population aging on export product quality is an "inverse U-shaped" process in which promotion leads to suppression,and that population aging promotes firms’ export product quality before the inflection point and vice versa after the inflection point.Other subgroups indicate that the effect of population aging on export quality is more pronounced in the eastern region and more effective in provinces with less population mobility.Further clustering then shows that population aging is more effective in promoting export quality in the East and less effective in promoting rural areas with low population mobility.The findings of this paper are validated by replacing the explanatory variables and excluding time and excluding large cities,and are further strengthened by eliminating endogeneity in the data through instrumental variable methods such as GMM.Based on these results,the paper makes three recommendations at the country,sector,and firm levels.The country should proactively respond to changes in labor supply advantages due to an aging population and increase investment in human capital,both quantitatively and qualitatively,especially in the central and western regions.Industry should accelerate the transition from a labor-intensive to a capitaland technology-intensive approach.Companies should shift from a quantitative to a qualitative approach to transform and modernize their operations as soon as possible.Therefore,it is strategically important to study the impact of population aging on the quality of manufacturing exports and to allow the regions to adjust their structures and stabilize growth while improving the quality of exports. |
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