Quality Upgrading and Productivity Gains from Domestic Market Access Changes in India
中文摘要
借助印度一项大型公路工程，我发现，对国内高收入市场可达性的提高使当地制造业工厂实现了生产率提升和质量升级。这些发现将既有关于向高收入国家出口所带来的生产率提升和质量升级效应，拓展到了本地市场与目的地市场收入差距小得多的情境。然而，提高国内高收入市场的可达性并不像出口那样具有变革性。关于工资的证据好坏参半，且仅限于生产工人，这类工人的技能通常低于非生产工人。这一变化也没有促使工厂更密集地使用非生产劳动。此外，中间投入品价格和进口投入品占比均未受到影响，这表明工厂并未使用质量更高的投入品。尽管存在一些局限，国内高收入市场似乎可以成为国外市场的可行替代选择，而对发展中国家的大多数企业而言，国外市场仍然难以进入。
Abstract
Taking advantage of a major highway project in India, I find that increased access to domestic high-income markets caused productivity gains and quality upgrading among local manufacturing plants. These findings extend existing results on the productivity and quality upgrading effects of exporting to high-income countries to a setting with much narrower income difference between the local and destination markets. However, increased access to domestic high-income markets was not as transformative as exporting. There is mixed evidence on wages that are limited to production workers, who are typically less skilled than non-production workers. It also did not lead to more intensive use of non-production labor. Moreover, there were no effects on the prices of intermediate inputs or the share of imported inputs, suggesting that plants did not use higher-quality inputs. Despite some limitations, domestic high-income markets appear to be viable substitutes for foreign markets, which remain inaccessible to most firms in developing countries.