印度国内市场准入变化带来的质量升级与生产率提升

中文摘要

本文利用印度一项重大高速公路项目, 发现国内高收入市场准入的增加提升了当地制造业工厂的生产率并促成了质量升级。这些发现将现有关于向高收入国家出口所带来的生产率与质量升级效应的研究结论, 扩展到本地市场与目的地市场之间收入差距小得多的情境中。然而, 国内高收入市场准入的增加并不像出口那样具有变革性。关于工资的证据较为混合, 且仅限于生产工人——他们通常比非生产工人技能更低; 国内高收入市场准入的增加也没有导致企业更密集地使用非生产劳动力。此外, 中间投入品价格与进口投入品占比均未受到影响, 表明工厂并未使用更高质量的投入品。尽管存在上述局限, 但对于发展中国家中大多数仍无法进入国外市场的企业而言, 国内高收入市场似乎是可行的替代选择。

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.