Contemporary Finance & Economics ›› 2023, Vol. 0 ›› Issue (12): 107-119.

• Industry & Trade • Previous Articles     Next Articles

Intermediate Trade Network and Enterprises’ Labor Income Share

YANG Zhi-hao   

  1. Institute of Industrial Economics of CASS, Beijing 100006, China
  • Received:2023-02-11 Revised:2023-06-09 Online:2023-12-15 Published:2023-12-14

Abstract: The income distribution under the open economy is the core issue to achieve the goal of common prosperity. Based on Page Algorithm, this paper makes use of the data from the China Industrial Enterprise Database, the customs database and the global bilateral trade database etc. to estimate the corporate centrality of intermediate trade network, and then explores how the centrality of intermediate trade network acts on the corporate labor income share. The findings show that improving the centrality of intermediate trade network of enterprises can significantly reduce the share of labor income. The conclusion is still robust when the impacting threshold value test with mixed variable, the instrumental variables and the quasi natural experiments are adopted to relieve the endogeneity. The mechanism analysis shows that the centrality of intermediate trade network affects the share of labor income through the factor costs, technical progress and wage raising mechanisms. The expansion analysis reveals that increasing the support of education and technology, improving the domestic upstream supply capacity, and expanding the scale of domestic demand will alleviate the inhibition of the centrality of intermediate trade network on the share of labor income. Thus, we should actively promote the construction of the secondary distribution mechanism led by the government and the tertiary distribution mechanism represented by charity activities, increase financial investment in education, scienceand technology, improve the supply capacity of the domestic supply chain, cultivate the potential demandsin the domestic markets, and then achieve the goal of common prosperity in the process of high-level opening up.

Key words: intermediates, trade networks, Page algorithm, share of labor income

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