贸易政策不确定性与出口企业加成率:理论机制与中国经验

Trade Policy Uncertainty and Export Firms’ Markups: Theoretical Mechanism and China’s Experiences

贸易政策不确定性是影响出口企业加成率的重要因素,而贸易政策不确定性通常被认为是由关税变化引起的,这就忽略了两个重要事实:企业会延迟对关税削减的反应,以及WTO约束承诺变化也是一种贸易政策不确定性类型。基于此,本文首先将关税约束承诺和企业延迟反应纳入拓展的异质企业贸易政策不确定性模型,以研究贸易政策不确定性对中国出口企业加成率的影响,从而开拓性地在理论和证据间架起桥梁。其次,利用中国工业企业数据库、海关数据库等数据对理论假设量化论证后发现:加入WTO后的9年,中国出口企业加成率对不确定性表现出普遍的反应延迟;在中国加入WTO后的少量年份,关税减让伴随同等或更大约束承诺减让使得中国企业的整体加成率上升。本文进一步将技术创新等因素纳入机制检验,发现出口产品质量、中间品进口是更有效的影响路径。最后的异质性分析表明:不确定性下降对高技术企业、合资企业、东部和沿海企业加成率所造成的非线性影响更明显。本文的一个隐含政策启示在于:在贸易政策不确定性增强之初,其一般不会引起企业出口加成率下降,这为WTO和各国改善多边或双边约束承诺的监督和执行、中国出口企业调整经营提供了窗口期。

Trade policy uncertainty is an important factor that affects export firms’markups,and trade policy uncertainty is usually considered to be caused by tariff changes,which ignores two important facts:firms may delay their response to tariff reduction,and the changes of WTO binding commitment are also a type of trade policy uncertainty.Based on these,firstly,this article incorporated tariffs’binding commitments and firm’s delayed response into the expanded and heterogeneous model of firms’trade policy uncertainty,so as to study the impact of trade policy uncertainty on the markups of Chinese export firms,which innovatively build a bridge between theory and evidence.Secondly,after quantitative demonstration to the theoretical hypothesis by using the data of China Industrial Enterprise Database and Customs Database,this article found:in the nine years after China’s entry to WTO,Chinese export firm’s markup show a general response of delay to trade policy uncertainty.In few years after China’s entry to WTO,tariff cuts accompanied by the reduction of equal or greater binding commitments made the overall markups of Chinese firms increased.Further in this article,technological innovation and other factors were incorporated into the mechanism test,and it is found that quality of export products and import of intermediate products are more effective factors.Finally,the heterogeneity analysis shows:the decline of trade policy uncertainty has a more obvious nonlinear effect on the markups of high-tech firms,joint ventures,firms in the eastern and coastal areas.One of the implicit policy implications of this article is:the increase in trade policy uncertainty generally does not lead a decrease to the markups of export firms at the beginning,which provides a time window for export firms to adjust their operations,and for WTO and countries in the world to improve the supervision and implementation of multilateral and bilateral binding commitments.