Abstract
The accession to the membership of the WTO has accelerated China’s foreign trade development, and made China the top exporting nation since 2010. Do export activities contribute to the productivity improvement of China’s industrial enterprises? and how? These are the main research questions of this paper. Previous researches on the relationship between export and productivity have divided into two distinct campuses: the “learning by exporting” school and the “self-selection” school. This paper tried to introduce a new variable into the debate. We argue that the autonomy of a firm’s management is a key factor connecting its exporting activity and productivity improvement.
The working hypotheses of this study is two-fold: firstly, trade regime matters. That is, the
enterprises engage in “ordinary trade” should make more efficiency improvement from exporting than those engage in “export-assembly trade”, since the latter has a more limited autonomy in making managerial decisions; Secondly, ownership matters. The foreign invested enterprises might have disadvantages in exploring potential benefits from exporting than the domestic private enterprises, since they do not enjoy a full-raged decision making autonomy in market competition. Our empirical analysis using a firm-level database of manufacturing enterprises in Guangdong province (2001-2007), has supported the above hypotheses.
