Export expansion, skill acquisition and industry specialization: evidence from china

By Bingjing Li. Journal of International Economics, 2018

117 citations recorded by the source corpus.

This paper studies the impact of export expansion due to the decline in tariffs faced by exporters on human capital accumulation across China. Following a theoretically consistent approach, I construct regional measures of high- and low-skill export demand shocks using the variation in initial industry composition across regions and differential skill intensities across industries. Using a sub-national data over the period 1990 to 2005, the empirical analysis shows that high-skill export shocks raise both high school and college enrollments, while low-skill export shocks depress both. These relationships appear to be attributable to the association between skill premium and skill demand embodied in export shocks. The amplified differences in skill abundance across regions reinforce the initial industry specialization patterns. These findings suggest a mutually reinforcing relationship between regional industry specialization and skill formation.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Sociology and Political Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/2711a68f02e4d4355a090af8922b8666df961bb1

Citations in the corpus

• Globalization and human capital investment: Export composition drives educational attainment (2017, unknown): “Research has shown that inequality in some developing countries has not decreased with trade, (10)Similarly, Li (2015) finds that trade liberalization reduced educational attainment in most regions in China.”
• Trade, pollution and mortality in China (2016, unknown): “We use employment share Lik,t−1 LCk,t−1 , where Lik,t−1 and LCk,t−1 are respectively prefecture i’s employment and China’s total employment in industry k at the beginning of the period, to proxy for a prefecture’s export share in industry k, XiRk,t−1 XCRk,t−1 , again because export data at the prefe”