Import technology sophistication and high-quality economic development: evidence from city-level data of China

This paper adopts five dimensions and 15 indexes of green development, people’s life, innovation ability, economic vitality and coordinated development to establish an evaluation system of high-quality economic development. It uses principal component analysis to measure the economic high-quality development of 233 prefecture-level cities from 2003 to 2016, and empirically studies the impact of import sophistication on China’s high-quality economic development. The results show that the increase in the sophistication of imported technology can significantly promote the high-quality development of the regional economy, and this effect is applicable to both imported intermediate and final products. In regions with higher and lower levels of economic development, eastern areas, and regions with high-quality development above 90% quantiles, the increase in imported technology content can significantly drive the high-quality development of the local economy. However, it has a great negative impact on the areas with a high-quality development index below 10% quantile. The robustness and endogeneity check support the above viewpoint. Further mechanism analysis shows that the final product import competition and intermediate product import spillover play a mediating role in the process of import sophistication affecting the high-quality economic development. The conclusion of this paper has important theoretical value and practical significance for the use of import trade to achieve high-quality economic development.