关键词: 劳动成本 , 进口中间产品质量 , 非位似偏好

Abstract:  Making use of a monopolistic competition mode and considering the situation of nonhomothetic preference demand and CES product function, this paper depicts the relationship between labor cost and the quality of imported intermediate products with an endogenous quality of intermediate product model. Using the data of manufacturing hs92 six digital imported and exported intermediate products of 38 countries from the CEPII BACI, it pursues the related empirics. The result shows: there is indeed a “U Shape” relationship between the increasing labor wage and the quality of imported intermediate products, and currently it is on the rising phase of the “U Shape”. This implies that facing the high labor cost, the firms with high productivity are inclined to import the intermediate products with high quality to match the workers with high quality, and then to relieve the pressure of increasing labor cost. Even adding various controlling variables, controlling different fixed effects, and considering distinct subsample, the result is still robust. The comparison of China and India also shows that the quality of imported intermediated product in China is lower than that of India. This indicates that it is very necessary to continuously improve the quality of workers and speed up the process of opening up if we want to improve the quality of imported intermediate product with the benefit of increasing wage to the maximum extent possible.

Key words: labor cost , quality of imported intermediate products , non-homothetic preference