Trade with innovation benefits: A re-appraisal using micro data from China

In recent years, the impact of international trade on firm innovation has received increasing attention. Some scholars argue that knowledge spillovers from trade are beneficial to innovation, while others argue that the intense competition from trade leads to a reduction in innovative activity, based on the Schumpeterian effect. To address this issue, we creatively construct a dataset of Chinese listed firms from 2000 to 2014 and conduct empirical tests using propensity score matching to investigate the impact of firms' intermediate goods import behavior on innovation performance at the micro level. We construct models of firms' decisions under closed market conditions and of the impact of intermediate goods imports on firms' innovation activities under open market conditions. Our study shows that firms that import intermediate goods are more innovative, and we validate the robustness of this result. We further discuss the potential mechanisms of how exposure to international markets affects innovation, and we find that firms' import behavior affects innovation through scale effect, technology effect, and profit effect. In short, importing intermediate goods enhances firm-level innovation in developing countries. Our study provides significant evidence on the impact of imports on firm-level innovation performance, and our findings provide a rationale for promoting the co-development of trade and firm innovation. This paper also has important policy implications that governments should continue to reduce trade barriers, promote trade openness, and enhance technology transfer and cooperation in order to reap more innovation benefits from trade.