中国城市出口产品演化

Evolution of urban export product in China

区域产业不断演化与升级推动区域的持续发展。演化经济地理学强调内生发展过程中路径依赖的作用,却忽视了外生因素以及制度因素等所带来的路径突破和创造的机会。利用中国海关进出口数据,研究中国城市出口产品的演化路径。结果表明:总体上,中国城市出口产品演化发展受到原有产品结构的影响,表现为路径依赖。然而,这种路径依赖发展模式存在显著的区域差异。具体而言,东部和中部地区城市出口产品演化受到产品关联的影响最大,更多的是扩展与本地具有技术关联的产品;而西部和东北地区对技术关联的依赖相对较弱。进一步的研究发现,对外联系、技术关联集聚经济和制度环境均有利于削弱对城市现有产品结构的依赖,有助于创造新路径。

Regional development is the process of continuous evolution,transformation and upgrading of regional industries.Evolutionary economic geography emphasizes the process of endogenous development,but it ignores the path breaking brought by exogenous and institutional factors.Based on a firm-product level dataset on Chinese exports during 2000-2013,this paper examines the evolution pattern of China’s exports space by aggregating firmproduct level data to city-product level ones.This paper adopt the relatedness indicator,which is based on the co-occurrence of products in the export basket of countries.This paper adjusts and defines the indicator as the co-occurrence of two products at the firm level.Based on technological relatedness,this paper develops product space of China’s exports,and explores whether the evolution of China’s urban export is path dependence,and how those cities break existing path-dependent trajectories and create a new path.The conclusions of the study show that,firstly,the evolution of China’s urban export products is affected by their original product structure and is characterized by the path dependence.Secondly,this research points out that the seemingly dominant path-dependent development trajectories can be broken through continuously improving external linkages,creating friendly environment of knowledge flow,and fostering an open-minded social and institutional context.Besides,the effects of these sets of variables vary across cities and industries.Specifically,technological relatedness played a more important role in the eastern and central China.Compared with labor intensive industries,technology intensive ones are more likely to depend on existing product structure.This paper points out that extra-regional linkages,related knowledge spillovers and open-minded institutional context have the potential to bring in and/or generate fresh know-how,which may enable cities to develop in a path-breaking way.