Research On The Impact Of Manufacturing Export Specialization And Diversification On Total Factor Productivity Growth And Structural Change

The high-quality development of the manufacturing industry cannot be achieved without high-level opening up to the outside world.Since the reform and opening up,China has actively participated in the construction of the economic globalization system,and foreign trade has developed rapidly.However,China is currently in a stage where cost advantages are gradually disappearing and new comparative advantages have not yet been formed.The effective cooperation of export specialization and diversification to optimize the export product structure is a key factor in achieving high-quality development of the manufacturing industry.This paper uses the trade product data in the United Nations Commodity Trade statistical database to examine the current export structure of China’s manufacturing industry from two dimensions of export specialization and diversification,To provide practical basis for better realizing the high-quality development of manufacturing industry driven by foreign trade.First,this paper constructs export specialization indicators based on the Theil index in the concentration degree of export commodities,and export diversification indicators based on the adjusted product differentiation index.It measures the export specialization and diversification degree of 27 industries in China’s manufacturing industry from 1999 to 2019 using the HS96 version of six digit code trade product data.The study finds that the average export specialization degree of the manufacturing industry shows a trend of first declining and then rising,The degree of export diversification shows a trend of first increasing and then decreasing.Secondly,this article integrates export specialization and diversification into the same framework for research.Based on international trade theory and economic growth theory,it deeply analyzes and explores how export specialization and diversification affect total factor productivity growth through technological progress,economies of scale,and resource allocation,in order to discover the underlying reasons why export specialization and diversification promote total factor productivity growth.Finally,this article applies the Stochastic Frontier Analysis(SFA)method to calculate the total factor productivity growth and its decomposition terms of China’s manufacturing industry by industry.A bidirectional fixed effects model is used to empirically test the impact of export specialization and diversification on the total factor productivity growth and its decomposition terms of the manufacturing industry.The empirical results show that the export specialization of China’s manufacturing industry significantly suppresses the growth of total factor productivity in the manufacturing industry,However,export diversification has no significant impact on the growth of total factor productivity in the manufacturing industry;Further examination found that export specialization has a significant negative impact on technological progress,while export diversification has no significant impact on technological progress;The effect of export specialization on economies of scale efficiency is not significant,while export diversification significantly improves the economies of scale efficiency of the industry;The effect of export specialization on resource allocation efficiency is not significant,while export diversification significantly suppresses the resource allocation efficiency of the industry.The research conclusion of this article has certain theoretical and practical significance for the high-quality development of the manufacturing industry and the cultivation of China’s export core competitiveness to build a strong trading country.