劳动力成本、倒逼创新与多产品企业出口动态——质量选择还是效率选择

Labor Cost,Forced Innovation and Multi-product Enterprise Export Dynamics: Choose Quality or Efficiency

本文在扩展的Melitz-Ottaviano模型理论分析基础上,通过构建中国工业企业数据、海关进出口产品数据与WITS全球关税数据合并数据库,考察了劳动力成本上涨对多产品企业创新投入选择及其产品出口动态的影响。结果显示:远离技术前沿阶段,面临劳动力成本上涨压力的低效率企业会选择效率而非质量创新策略增强出口竞争力,通过扩展产品范围并分散出口产品集中度来探索出口可能性边界以增加出口量而非抬高价格,从而促进出口销售总额增长;效率水平跨越一定门槛后,准技术前沿企业会选择产品质量创新策略,通过压缩产品范围并提高产品集中度来获取现有产品,特别是核心产品新利润增长点以刺激出口。加快企业效率跨越是现阶段推动创新发展战略的重要质量基础支撑。

Faced with a complex and turbulent business environment,multi-product companies adjusted their product export dynamics by allocating the quality and efficiency inputs to promote corporate export performance.This study was based on the China Industrial Enterprise Database,the Customs Import and Export Database and the WITS Database to examine the impact of rising labor costs on the choice of innovation investment and the export dynamics of multi-product export enterprises.The results show that,under the pressure of rising labor costs,low-efficiency enterprises away from the technological frontier are likely to choose efficiency rather than quality improvement strategies to enhance export competitiveness.They usually explore export possibility boundaries to increase export volume,by expanding product range and diversifying the concentration of export products instead of increasing price,thus promoting the growth of total export sales.After the efficiency reaches a certain level,the quasi-technical frontier enterprises will choose the product quality upgrade strategy and obtain the new profit growth point of the existing products,especially the core products,through stimulating the export by compressing the product range and increasing the product concentration.Improving productivity is an important basic step for promoting quality innovation development strategy at this stage.