地区质量声誉与企业出口表现

Regional Reputation for Quality and Corporate Export Performance

本文研究在产品质量信息不对称的背景下,"地区质量声誉"对企业出口表现的影响。我们以本地区企业出口的同类产品平均质量为该产品"地区质量声誉"的代理变量,发现以地区为主体的出口产品质量声誉会对企业出口绩效产生显著为正的影响,而且当企业出口的产品质量差异化程度越高时,这种影响越大。进一步研究发现,"地区质量声誉"对非外资企业、通过贸易中介出口的企业、出口目的国距离更远的企业以及自身产品质量较低的企业影响更大。除此之外,"地区质量声誉"的提高还有利于产品出口价格的提升。这些证据与"地区质量声誉"在存在质量信息不对称时有助于企业实现更优秀出口表现的假说相一致。本文的研究表明,在推动中国出口产品质量升级的过程中,地方政府需要关注作为地区公共物品的"地区质量声誉"的培育。相应地,中央政府也需要关注"国家质量声誉"的培育,提升"中国制造"的国际声誉,以避免中国出口陷入"低质量陷阱"。

China＇s exports have been growing rapidly during the last decades. However, room for further export growth is shrinking due to costlier labor, the development of manufacturing in other developing countries like Vietnam and India, the appreciation of the renminbi and intensified trade frictions. As such, how to transform and upgrade export structure are urgent problems faced by China. However, with the upgrading of the quality of export products, quality information asymmetry will become a more important problem. In international trade, due to spatial distance and differences in language, systems, cultures and other factors, the information asymmetry on product quality has become more severe. When it is difficult to fully identify the quality of an individual firm, buyers may consult the reputation of the group to which that firm belongs as a source of information. Regions and industries are often used as natural criteria for dividing groups, which makes regional and national reputation for product quality potentially important for exporting. Unfortunately, ＂made in China＂ is currently a sign of low quality. Thus, improving country or regional reputation is a pressing problem that must be solved for China. This paper shows that a regional reputation for quality has an important impact on the performance of firm exports in China; thus, it provides indirect evidence of the importance of country reputation for export performance. On the issue of a ＂national quality reputation＂ , Cage ＆ Rouzet （2015） stress that a country＇s ＂low quality＂ label puts it into a ＂low-quality trap＂. Chisik （2003） shows that national quality reputation is a source of comparative advantage. However, the impact of regional reputation of export quality has mainly been investigated by theorists, and little empirical study has been conducted. The main contribution of this paper is to make up for this gap in the research. Based on Chinese export enterprise data, we use the average export quality of neighboring firms in the same region of the same product as a proxy for regional quality reputation and link it with the export performance of enterprises. We find that higher regional quality reputation leads to higher exports of firms in that region. This finding is robust to controlling for trade costs, regional supply shocks, demand shocks in destination countries and other potential endogeneity problems. This positive impact comes from a rather intuitive mechanism： in the presence of asymmetric information that makes buyers unable to fully identify the product quality of individual exporters, the belief in the average quality of the exporter （which is affected by regional reputation） should affect the buyer＇s purchasing behavior （Akerlof, 1970）. The current paper empirically verifies this implication from several angles. First, regional reputation has a greater impact on domestic firms, as the quality information asymmetry of domestic firms is higher than that of foreign enterprises. Second, firms whose product quality is higher have greater capacity and motivation to signal the quality of their products and are less dependent on regional quality reputation. Third, the impact of regional quality reputation is greater for firms that export to more distant countries because they may face higher levels of information asymmetry. Fourth, firms that export through trade intermediaries are more affected by regional quality reputation than firms that export directly. We also find that regional quality reputation has a positive impact on product price. This evidence is consistent with the hypothesis that regional quality reputation is helpful for firms to overcome quality information asymmetry and improve export performance. The results of this study indicate that with the upgrading of export product quality, local Chinese governments must pay more attention to the cultivation of ＂regional quality reputation＂ ,which is a regional public good. Similarly, the Central Government of China must help to cultivate a ＂national quality reputation＂ to improve the reputation of ＂made in China＂ and to avoid falling into the ＂low-quality trap＂.