人工智能促进了制造业企业出口产品升级吗?——基于技术复杂度视角的分析

Does artificial intelligence help manufacturing companies upgrade their exports?:Analysis based on technology complexity perspective

人工智能(AI)引领的新一轮科技革命和产业变革方兴未艾,促进制造业与人工智能等数字技术深度融合、推动工业智能化已成为制造业出口产品升级的新方向。本文使用微观企业数据,基于出口技术复杂度视角探讨了人工智能对出口产品升级的影响及内在机理。研究发现:以工业机器人为典型应用的人工智能技术显著提高了企业出口技术复杂度,在考虑内生性问题及稳健性检验后依然成立。异质性分析显示,人工智能对劳动密集型和技术密集型企业的升级效果更明显,具备竞争优势、规模较大的一般贸易企业更容易通过应用人工智能技术进行出口产品升级。机制检验发现,技术进步、优化要素结构以及降低出口成本是人工智能促进出口产品升级的重要机制。

A new round of technological revolution and industrial transformation led by artificial intelligence(AI)is on the way.Promoting the deep integration of manufacturing with AI and other digital technologies,and promoting industrial intelligent development has become a new direction for upgrading manufacturing exports.Using micro-enterprise data,this paper deeply explores the impact of AI on export product upgrading and the inner mechanism based on the perspective of technical complexity.The study finds that AI technology with industrial robots as a typical application significantly increases the technical complexity of enterprise exports,which still holds after considering the endogeneity problem and robustness test.Heterogeneity analysis shows that artificial intelligence has a more obvious upgrade effect on labor-intensive and technology-intensive enterprises.General trading enterprises with competitive advantages and larger scales are more likely to upgrade their export products through the application of artificial intelligence technology.The mechanism test shows that technological progress,optimization of factor structure,and reduction of export cost are important mechanisms for AI to promote export upgrading.