میزان واردات، رشد بهره وری، و آموزش زنجیره تامین

We present evidence that importing is a source of international technology transfer. Using a detailed panel of Indonesian manufacturers, our analysis shows that firms in industries supplying increasingly import-intensive sectors have higher productivity growth than other firms. This finding suggests that linkages through vertical supply relationships are the channel through which import-driven technology transfer occurs. To our knowledge, these are the first firm-level results showing that downstream imports play a role in productivity gains. Together with the literature linking FDI and exporting to technology spillovers, the results provide a third component to the argument that trade and openness promote economic growth.

The international economics literature has had a lasting interest in the relationship between trade and technology transfer (Keller, 2000, Saggi, 2002 and Werner, 2002). Early studies using aggregate country-level data suggest trade is an important driver of economic growth. These findings have prompted a stream of research on firm-level mechanisms that support these aggregate findings. Existing research has mostly focused on two mechanisms: exports by local firms and foreign direct investment (FDI) by multinational firms. The majority of studies associate both mechanisms with increases in productivity, although the direction of the causality is still under scrutiny. But much less effort has been devoted to the export counterpart, imports, which are the focus of this paper. In particular, few studies have used firm-level data to examine imports as a mechanism for technology transfer (Amiti and Konings, forthcoming, Fernandes, 2007, Keller and Yeaple, 2003, MacGarvie, 2006 and Muendler, 2004), and the results so far have been mixed. This paper asks whether imports can improve firm technological capabilities, as measured by productivity gains. Using a rich panel dataset on Indonesian manufacturers from 1988 to 1996, we examine factory productivity growth and its relation to imports in downstream industries. We control for the potential endogeneity between imports and productivity by conditioning on static industrial sector and firm-level attributes and by considering only import activity largely exogenous to the focal firm. We find strong evidence that firms selling to sectors that rely more on imports have greater productivity growth than other firms. This finding is consistent with the hypothesis that vertical supply relationships are an important mechanism through which import-driven technology transfer occurs. Identifying imports as a source of international technology transfer adds a critical third component, along with exports and FDI, to the argument that trade promotes economic growth. The paper is organized as follows. The next section discusses the theoretical and empirical literature on the relationship between trade, technology, and productivity growth with particular attention to the role of imports and the importance of the supply chain structure. Section 3 provides some background on the liberalization of Indonesia’s trade regime and Section 4 discusses the data. Section 5 highlights our econometric identification strategy, Section 6 presents the results, and Section 7 concludes.

This study presents the evidence that importing is a source of international technology transfer. Using detailed firm-level data from Indonesia, we show that the firms selling to sectors with increasing import intensity have higher productivity growth than other firms. These results are consistent under a number of econometric approaches that address potential endogeneity between importing activity and firm productivity as well as confounding effects such as FDI, concentration, and survival. We also find that early exposure to downstream imports brings with it the greatest opportunities for learning, while an increasingly larger presence of imports induces productivity improvements at a declining marginal rate. In addition, results show that productivity improvement is greater in contexts where suppliers are more concentrated, suggesting that competition aids in inducing improvements. The analysis also suggests that exit due to pressure from downstream imports plays little or no role in productivity improvements. Rather, the productivity gains we observe result from improvements in the existing firms. Finally, the results imply that the large firms and the firms in intermediate goods sectors are better able to learn from imports. Overall, the findings of this research imply that linkages though vertical supply relationships are a relevant mechanism through which import-driven knowledge transfer occurs. To our knowledge, these are the first firm-level results showing that the downstream imports play a role in the creation of technological capabilities, as measured by productivity. This is an important contribution to the identification of international knowledge spillovers, a critical component in the argument that trade promotes economic growth.