EconPapers    
Economics at your fingertips  
 

Impact of industrial robot applications on global value chain participation of China manufacturing industry: Mediation effect based on product upgrading

Shuangzhi Zhang

PLOS ONE, 2023, vol. 18, issue 11, 1-22

Abstract: Promoting the application of industrial robot (IR) is an important module for China to build core competitiveness, and it is also the main grasp of global value chain participation (GVCP). Using China manufacturing industry panel data from 2006–2014, working from the perspective of product upgrading, this paper empirically analyzes the impact of IR applications on GVCP. The empirical results show that IR applications weaken China’ incentives to participate in global value chains (GVCs); this weakening effect is reflected in both forward and backward participation in GVCs. On the one hand, the mediation effect test results indicate that the product upgrading effect brought about by IR applications can help China achieves the import substitution of intermediate inputs and uses local intermediate inputs to produce exports. These steps would reduce the backward participation in GVCs. On the other hand, the localization of manufacturing can result in China losing the opportunity to export intermediate inputs to other economies, thus reducing the forward participation of GVCs. Of course, due to sample limitations, the research conclusions of this article are only applicable to interpreting the Chinese economy.

Date: 2023
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0293399 (text/html)
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article/file?id= ... 93399&type=printable (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0293399

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0293399

Access Statistics for this article

More articles in PLOS ONE from Public Library of Science
Bibliographic data for series maintained by plosone ().

 
Page updated 2025-05-10
Handle: RePEc:plo:pone00:0293399