Does High-Tech Export Cause More Technology Spillover? Evidence from Contemporary China

This paper attempts to investigate whether high-tech product export causes more technology spillover compared with traditionally primary manufactured goods export. A generalized multi-sector spillover model is presented to involve the causations of export composition and technology spillover, which is based on two distinctive approaches of measuring technology spillover: “between-spillover” and “within-spillover”. The empirical estimation is conducted with a panel analysis involving 31 provinces in China over the period of 1998-2005. Although high-tech export sectors involve a higher productivity compared with other sectors, this productivity advantage in high-tech export sectors does not cause technology spillover towards both domestic sectors and other export sectors. Therefore, this paper suggests that technology spillover of export mainly takes place in traditional export sectors rather than high-tech export sectors