The Construction of High-standard FTA Network System and Dynamic Evolution of China’s Multi-product Enterprises Exports
Lu Jing1, Wang Taoxuan1,2, Pan Xiuyang3
1.School of Economics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China 2.Center for Research on China Open Economy, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China 3.The People’s Bank of China, Beijing 100045, China
Abstract The reform and opening up in the new era requires the construction of a high-standard free trade area network facing the world and a mutually beneficial, multi-balanced, safe and efficient open economic system. The construction of a multi-level and diversified free trade area network system is the strategic focus of the new pattern of opening up to the outside world at this stage. China has signed 17 free trade agreements and their applications to join the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP) and the Digital Economy Partnership Agreement (DEPA), showing that the construction of China’s high-standard free trade area network system is moving to a new level. In the current international trade system, participation in the international market with the help of the free trade area network has become an important way for enterprises to improve their internationalization level. Enterprises can realize the reallocation of internal resources by adjusting the scope, concentration and product quality of export products to cope with changes in the exogenous environment. Therefore, in a world pattern dominated by regionalization, it is of great theoretical and practical significance to deeply explore the construction of China’s high-standard free trade network system and the dynamic evolution law of Chinese enterprises’ exports.This paper uses the combined database of Chinese industrial enterprise data, customs product data, patent data and WITS tariff data, and applies the high-dimensional fixed-effect Poisson Pseudo-maximum Likelihood (PPML) estimation to investigate the effect of China’s implementation of free trade agreement strategy on the export dynamics of multi-product manufacturing enterprises. The results show that after China concludes a FTA with its trading partner countries, the export scope of multi-product enterprises is expanded, the product concentration is reduced, and the product quality at the enterprise level is significantly improved. By introducing three adjustment variables of enterprise, region and FTA’s own quality, it is found that the higher the quality of the free trade agreement, the higher the production efficiency of the enterprise, the more perfect the institutional environment of the region where it is located, the more significant the dynamic optimization of the enterprise’s exports. Enterprises are more inclined to expand the boundary of export products and produce more kinds of high-quality products. The research results of transmission mechanism show that FTA mainly affects export dynamics through three intermediary channels: the scope of imported intermediate products, the quality of imported intermediate products, independent R&D and innovation. FTA will encourage enterprises to import more kinds and higher quality intermediate products, and stimulate enterprises to improve their independent R&D and innovation ability through technology spillover effect. By further decomposing and refining the effect of product quality change, this paper finds that the change of product quality at the enterprise level mainly comes from the replacement of old and new products and the improvement of surviving products’ quality in the enterprise. The results of heterogeneity analysis show that the economic level of the destination country, industry capital intensity and enterprise nature have a significant heterogeneous impact on the export dynamics: after signing a FTA with high-income destination countries, the effect of export product scope expansion and quality improvement of Chinese enterprises is more obvious; FTA will promote more significant optimization of product dynamics of enterprises in technology-intensive industries. Compared with state-owned enterprises and foreign-funded enterprises, private enterprises suffer from more restrictions and have less dynamic changes in their products. The high-standard free trade area network in our country brings quality improvement effect and boundary expansion effect to enterprises. Therefore, signing more high-level, high-quality and deep-seated free trade agreements and reasonably constructing China’s high-standard free trade area network will be an important way to effectively promote China’s transformation from a large trading country to a powerful trading country and realize a high-level opening up to the outside world.The marginal contribution of this paper is first, using PPML technology to describe the impact of participating in FTA on the dynamic effect of multi-product enterprises’ exports, and through empirical research to prove the transmission mechanism of FTA’s dynamic effect on enterprises’ exports; second, this paper explores the regulatory role of enterprise production efficiency, regional institutional environment and FTA quality from three dimensions of micro enterprise level, macro regional level and FTA itself; third, the effect of product quality change is further subdivided through the internal quality decomposition of enterprises, which confirms the dynamic effect of FTA on enterprises’ export.
Lu Jing,Wang Taoxuan,Pan Xiuyang. The Construction of High-standard FTA Network System and Dynamic Evolution of China’s Multi-product Enterprises Exports[J]. JOURNAL OF ZHEJIANG UNIVERSITY, 2023, 53(8): 63-84.
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