Importing intermediates from high-tech countries versus from low-tech countries: Theory and evidence from enterprise-level energy efficiency

Extant literature concerning trade's environmental effects just employs the traditional dichotomy to subdivide trade into export and import, which fails to consider the heterogeneity of trade partners. Nowadays, the global trade policy is becoming more and more uncertain, thus existing literature cannot be properly used to predict the effects of trading with different countries on the ecological environment. To analyze the role of import source country in effects of importing intermediate products on energy performance, our research establishes a theoretical model and uses Chinese data at enterprise level to conduct empirical analysis. We find that both importing intermediate products from high-tech and low-tech countries could raise enterprise's energy efficiency. Compared with importing intermediate products from low-tech countries, importing from high-tech countries will improve innovation ability and bring technology spillover effect to the enterprise to a larger degree. Thus, importing from high-tech countries has a greater impact on energy efficiency improvement. Altogether, our research provides persuasive evidence that important role of import source country must not be ignored when studying the environmental effect of importing.