2000—2011年产品空间网络视角下中国出口演化及其机制

经济全球化下,研究中国出口演化对经济发展的影响至关重要。西方演化经济学界“产品空间网络”理论的提出,为地区产业发展提供了科学复杂网络方法的新视角。国内学界基于该理论在全球尺度下研究中国产业演化的研究甚为匮乏。文章利用2000—2011年全球海关贸易数据库,以R软件可视化全球动态产品空间,构建了“核心区位度”新指标来科学测度国家在全球贸易格局中的位置,探讨国家在产品空间网络中“核心-外围”位置对本国经济的影响。研究发现,不同发展程度的国家在产品网络空间的位置存在差别,国家的经济表现越好,国家越倾向于在产品空间网络处于核心位置。中国已改变传统上的专业化生产两极分化出口贸易模式,形成相对均衡化的贸易格局,出口优势产品开始从产品空间网络的外围轻工业集群,走向核心地带的机械设备集群及化工综合集群,成为全球网络核心区位度提升幅度最大的国家之一。通过回归模型得出,影响中国在产业空间网络中核心位置演化的主要因素是教育质量与研发投资等因素,而外商投资并未对中国走向网络核心位置存在显著影响。

Evolution and Mechanism of China’s Exports in a Dynamic Product Space Network

China’s foreign trade has developed rapidly since the reform and opening up. After joining the WTO in the early 21 st century, China’s export economy has risen to unprecedented levels. In the past few decades,processing trade and "compressed industrialization" have changed China’s comparative advantages and export structure. However, with the increase in production costs, China’s traditional industrial pattern can no longer sustain its development. Exploring China’s industrial evolution and studying its internal influence mechanism have great significance in responding to the challenges. Different from traditional research that studied export evolution by describing its quantity and structure at the macro level, the popular evolutionary economic theory"Product Space" adopts a network perspective to study industrial evolution at the micro level and thus, makes a breakthrough in economic geography. Product upgrade is essentially a process wherein a region shifts to new,related products in the product space. Therefore, this article uses global customs data for 2000-2011 to construct a dynamic product space. Some scholars have proposed the idea that developed countries tend to produce core products, and products located in the core area of the product space can move to nearby regions more easily than those in the periphery. However, there is no unified quantification to measure countries’ core‐periphery location in the product space yet. Many existing proxy variables are related to economic attributes and there may exist endogeneity problems in measuring productivity. First, our article proposes an exogenous indicator, "core location," based on the topology structure of the space network. The regression model indicates that our indicator is reasonable and confirms that a country’s location in the product space does indeed affect its economy. Then, we analyze China’s evolution in terms of the overall export pattern and export location in the dynamic product space.Results show China has changed its traditional specialized pattern to an increasingly balanced pattern, and its"core location" is becoming bigger, which means it is gradually crawling toward the core area. Compared to other countries, China ranked at the top on the changing range of "co-location". Finally, we analyze the influence mechanism of China’s location evolution in the product space. We find that human capital is the dominant impact factor of China’s location evolution. Education and R&D investment, as the main aspects of human capital, can increase knowledge spillovers and promote innovation, which in turn generates technology progress and industrial upgrading. It is interesting that foreign investment does not really have significant potential to help China move to the core area in global trade.