劳动成本与进口中间产品质量——来自多国(地区)产品—行业层面的证据

LABOR COST AND THE QUALITY OF IMPORTED INTERMEDIATE PRODUCTS——Evidence from the Multinational Product-industry Level Data

本文在垄断竞争框架内,引入非位似需求函数与CES生产函数,构建了一个内生化的中间产品质量模型,以刻画劳动成本与进口中间产品质量之间的关系,并采用CEPII-BACI数据库1995—2009年38国(地区)hs92六位码数制造业中间产品进出口贸易数据与WIOD数据进行了实证检验。结果发现,劳动成本与进口中间产品质量之间的确存在"U型"非线性关系,且当前处于"U型"上升阶段,即面对高劳动成本,生产率高的企业倾向于进口高质量中间产品以匹配高素质劳动者,进而缓解劳动成本上涨压力。即使加入不同控制变量,控制不同固定效应,并考虑不同子样本情形,这一结果仍稳健。中印对比还显示,中国进口的中间产品质量较印度更低。这就意味着中国要最大限度地借助工资上升提高进口中间产品质量,还需不断提升劳动者素质,加大对外开放进程。

Making use of a monopolistic competition mode and considering the situation of non-homo- thetic preference demand and CES product function, this paper depicts the relationship between labor cost and the quality of imported intermediate products with an endogenous quality of intermediate product mod- el. Using the data of manufacturing hs92 six digital imported and exported intermediate products of 38 countries from the CEPII BACI, it pursues the related empirics. The result shows： there is indeed a ＂U Shape＂ relationship between the increasing labor wage and the quality of imported intermediate products, and currently it is on the rising phase of the ＂U Shape＂. This implies that facing the high labor cost, the firms with high productivity are inclined to import the intermediate products with high quality to match the workers with high quality, and then to relieve the pressure of increasing labor cost. Even adding various controlling variables, controlling different fixed effects, and considering distinct sub-sample, the result is still robust. The comparison of China and India also shows that the quality of imported intermediated prod- uct in China is lower than that of India. This indicates that it is very necessary to continuously improve the quality of workers and speed up the process of opening up if we want to improve the quality of imported in- termediate product with the benefit of increasing wage to the maximum extent possible.