Impact of Global Value Chains on Export Technology Content of China’s Manufacturing Industry

Abstract

With the deepening development of global value chains (GVC), a large number of foreign intermediate inputs have been integrated in the products production process of one country, thus the technology content of export products may not completely come from the home country. According to the new measurement based on production process, this paper calculates the domestic technology content of China’s manufacturing industry from 2000 to 2014 by using the data of World Input–Output Database (WIOD). Furthermore, it has an empirical analysis of the effect of GVC position on domestic technology content using the panel data of China’s 18 manufacturing industries. The results showed that: the technology content of the China’s manufacturing exports are increasing, and the domestic technology content grows faster than overall technology content, which indicats that China’s manufacturing industry has been upgraded and optimized in a certain way; However, there is still a certain gap between China’s manufacturing technology content and the corresponding indicators of major developed countries; And the upgrading of GVC position of Chinese manufacturing industry can significantly improve the domestic technology content of manufacturing exports.