Inter-regional Technological Complementarity,Balanced Development and Corporate Global Value Chain Climbing
Over the past four decades of economic development,the innovation resources and capabilities of China's regions have been accumulated,upgraded,and expanded significantly.However,due to the increasing complexity and diversity of technological development and the limited capacity of individual cities to absorb innovation resources,technological complementarities between regions have gradually emerged.At the same time,the production process of products in global value chains(GVCs)is becoming increasingly fragmented,with the parts and components for product production increasingly being reallocated to geographical areas with different strengths.This trend provides an important technological basis for inter-regional coordination of the domestic division of labor through technological complementarities,reducing duplicative competition and thus facilitating GVC climbing.This paper constructs a theoretical model based on the sourcing of intermediate products by export enterprises based on characteristic facts,and argues that the impact of inter-regional technological complementarities on enterprises'GVC climbing is mainly realized through two channels.First,inter-regional technological complementarities increase the productivity of local enterprises;second,inter-regional technological complementarities enable local enterprises to source more intermediate inputs from domestic sources in production.This paper uses the 2000-2014 China Industrial Enterprise Customs Database and the China Patent Database to validate the conclusions of the model from the perspective of the domestic value added rate in exports.The results suggest that inter-regional technological complementarities increase firms'domestic value added rate in exports,explaining about 25％of the growth in Chinese firms'DVAR over the period 2000-2014.The main realization mechanism is to increase firms'share of domestic intermediate inputs and improve their total factor productivity.The heterogeneity analysis shows that the promotion effect of technological complementarities is stronger for firms with lower human capital and firms located in innovative peripheral regions with high market accessibility,effectively playing the role of narrowing inter-firm and inter-regional gaps and thus promoting balanced regional development.Finally,this paper discusses the specific market performance of firms after changing their position in GVCs and finds that firms have significant improvement in several aspects such as the range of export products,product quality,the number of export destinations,and the cost plus of exports.The possible innovations of this paper are as follows.First,it provides a new perspective for understanding regional complementarities in terms of technological linkages and validates the mechanism of GVC climbing with intermediate product innovation.Second,this paper further enriches research on the sources of regional and firm comparative advantages.At present,scholars mainly focus on how to improve firms'innovation capabilities,and the understanding of firms'other sources of innovation is not comprehensive enough,and explanations for the differences in these inputs and other sources of innovation across regions are lacking.This paper enriches existing research from the perspective of inter-regional technological complementarities.Finally,this paper demonstrates the importance of technological externalities as manifested in inter-regional technological complementarities in guiding special practices in China,enriching the discussion of the mechanism of technology diffusion's impact on inter-firm and inter-regional disparities in the Chinese context in existing literature.
technological complementarityglobal value chaindomestic value added ratio in exportsbalanced development
万方数据
维普
