1. Introduction
The gradual disappearance of the demographic dividend, the recurrence of financial risks and the sudden outbreak of COVID-19 impacts China’s supply chain and industrial chain development. Together, these and other challenges, coupled with the further weakening of the economic growth momentum brought about by the traditional mode of development in the country, exacerbate the uncertainty and vulnerability of the development of manufacturing exports. In light of the complex and volatile development situation at home and abroad, how to maintain long-term sustainable and stable development in the face of the impact on manufacturing exports is a major practical problem that needs to be faced and solved. Although China’s manufacturing exports are due to the complete industrial chain and support an export “substitution effect”, relative to other countries, they show strong resilience in the short term. It is important to note, however, that in addition to shocks from short-cycle fluctuations such as financial crises [
1], manufacturing-export development is also exposed to shocks from long-term slow disturbances such as climate change and resource depletion [
2], which puts it in a long-term evolutionary process that gives rise to differences in export resilience. In the face of the impact of short-cycle fluctuations, the government, through its intervention policy, can enable manufacturing exports to return to their original growth state relatively quickly after suffering a shock, which is reflected in the ability of manufacturing exports to resist and recover from a single contingency. In the face of the impact of long-term disturbances, the failure to consider the long-term path derivation and industrial upgrading process and an over-reliance on the original development path, factor utilisation, and institutional framework will make manufacturing exports, even if they return to the original growth equilibrium, inevitably decline due to the low-end locked-in development path when faced with a new round of external shocks in the future. Therefore, to repair the growth process of China’s manufacturing exports that is being impacted, and through the mutual adjustment and co-evolution of internal factors to ensure that manufacturing exports achieve the ability to undergo adaptive development, such that the growth pattern of manufacturing exports moves from recovery to innovation, the traditional mindset that relies on the advantages of cheap resource factors to promote growth must be transformed. Against the background of the decline in the marginal increase in the global supply of resources, the alleviation of the ecological and environmental crisis can provide a rare historical opportunity for manufacturing exports to cope with the violent external impacts of the financial crisis, COVID-19, and so on. If we can make reasonable use of the opportunities brought about by external forces, find the direction of the development of manufacturing exports, and upgrade towards digitisation, intelligence, and greening [
3,
4,
5,
6], we can not only make the manufacturing exports have a better resistance and recovery ability in the face of shocks but to even gradually adapt to the external environment and to carry out self-renewal and orientation. To realise the transformation and upgrading of the manufacturing-export growth mode towards greening, innovation and technological progress are the key factors. Green technological innovation will bring about industrial innovation and extinction, thus promoting the adjustment of the manufacturing production system and the reconstruction of the export structure.
So, in the face of the slow perturbation of global climate change and resource depletion, how can the pressure from the global green transition be transformed into an opportunity for China’s manufacturing industry to enhance its international competitiveness? Can green technology innovation become a new engine to enhance manufacturing-export resilience? This requires us to examine the risk-absorbing capacity of the manufacturing-export system from a more in-depth and comprehensive perspective and to explore the path of reshaping export resilience.
Compared with existing studies, the marginal contributions of this paper are as follows: Firstly, by identifying and analysing manufacturing-export resilience, it enriches the meaning and measurement of export resilience. Secondly, it analyses the intrinsic logic of how green technological innovation affects manufacturing-export resilience and empirically examines the mediating effect played by capital allocation efficiency; at the same time, it explores the moderating effect of intellectual-property protection and the threshold effect of government intervention, which is a further exploration of the path of how green technological innovation affects manufacturing-export resilience. Thirdly, based on how different types of regions provide differentiated evidence of green technological innovation affecting manufacturing-export resilience, clear green technological innovations to enhance manufacturing-export resilience may exist in the boundary conditions, which is a useful supplement to the analysis of geographical differences in export resilience.
The remainder of the paper is structured as follows.
Section 2 presents the literature review.
Section 3 explains the selection of variables, measurement methods, and sources of data collection; designs and fits the empirical model; and conducts a mechanistic analysis. In addition, we test the heterogeneity and robustness of the empirical model and discuss the findings.
Section 4 presents the empirical results.
Section 5 further investigates the moderating effect of intellectual-property protection and the threshold effect of government intervention.
Section 6 discusses the empirical results in detail.
Section 7 summarises the findings of the paper.
2. Literature Review
Resilience is an interdisciplinary concept and its perception has evolved from “engineering resilience” [
7] and “ecological resilience” [
7] to “adaptive resilience [
8]”. While engineering resilience is used to describe the ability of a system to return to an equilibrium or stable state after a disturbance [
9], ecological resilience breaks away from the idea of engineering resilience as a “single equilibrium” [
10] by suggesting that ecosystems that are disturbed will change the original equilibrium, recover, and evolve to a new equilibrium state. Although resilience is an inherent property of a system, it is independent of shocks and evolves according to the external environment, so that there is no stable equilibrium [
2]. Therefore, scholars began to try to introduce complexity theory and evolutionary ideas to promote the idea of resilience from a static equilibrium and a rebound to non-equilibrium, evolution, and diversity and thus put forward the concept of adaptive resilience in line with the logical core of evolutionary economic geography [
11]. Adaptive resilience no longer focuses on whether the system can reach an equilibrium state after a shock but emphasises the system’s coping and dynamic self-adjustment ability in the face of shocks [
12]. Martin [
1], based on the concept of adaptive resilience, defines economic resilience as an adaptive, dynamic adjustment capacity, which includes the ability of economic agents to resist crises, recover from crises, self-renew, and reposition themselves, which has been affirmed and adopted by several scholars [
13].
With the deepening of scholars’ understanding of the concept of resilience, the measurement and evaluation methods of economic resilience are also being enriched. Currently, there are two main categories of methods for measuring and evaluating resilience: one is the single-indicator sensitivity analysis method, which judges the resilience of an economic system to a crisis by calculating the gap between the trend and actual values of the core variables before and after the occurrence of an external disturbing shock. In empirical studies, the core variables in a single indicator mainly contain the GDP growth rate, unemployment rate, and employment [
14,
15,
16]. The other category is the indicator system approach, which measures economic resilience by screening economic indicators that are highly correlated with resilience and constructing a basket of indicator systems [
17]. Briguglio et al. [
18] constructed an economic-resilience index system from four fundamentals: macroeconomic stability, social development, market efficiency, and economic governance. Yu et al. [
19] measured regional economic resilience from six dimensions, including the economic level, innovation level, and upon opening up. Ubago et al. [
20] constructed a composite index of regional economic resilience in Spain from the dimensions of industrial structure, capital value, labour force, economic level, and so on. Since most existing studies define export resilience as the ability of exports to resist and recover in the face of external shocks, the sensitivity analysis of a single index is mainly used to measure it, which mostly selects the export growth rate and export value as core variables to evaluate the export resilience in different periods [
21].
Through the empirical analysis of factors affecting export resilience, in the case of external shocks, the path to improving export resilience may come from export policies, structural upgrading, technological innovation, local market size, and other aspects. With the rise of the global green revolution, the field of international trade has gradually manifested itself as a combination of environmental governance and trade measures, so that the traditional resource- and environment-consuming mode of export development at home has been constrained, and the green growth model has become an inevitable choice for achieving benign growth in manufacturing exports. Braun and Wield [
22] believe that green technology is a technology that reduces environmental pollution and the consumption of energy and raw materials, so green technology innovation is considered to be an important means of ameliorating ecological damage and achieving sustainable development [
23], and it is committed to the pursuit of a “win–win” situation between the environment and the economy [
24]. Most scholars believe that technological innovation can be used to improve the environment [
25]. Environmental regulation and technological innovation are linked when examining the impact on export trade. Technological innovation triggered by environmental regulation can improve the quality of export products [
26,
27], enhance export incentives, and protect the international competitiveness of products [
3]. Haddoud et al. [
28], using a sample of Polish family firms, find that strategic commitment to environmental issues has a positive impact on technological innovation, which increases export intensity. Bertarelli and Lodi [
29], using microdata, empirically find that environmental taxes positively affect the propensity for technology innovation and, consequently, indirectly contribute to the propensity to export. In addition to the linear effect, some scholars have found that technological innovation under environmental regulation has a “U-shaped” promotional effect on the export competitiveness of China’s manufacturing industry [
30], and that technological innovation hurts export trade before reaching the inflexion point. Qiang et al. [
31] also found that, in the long run, and when environmental regulation reaches a certain intensity, technological innovation has a promotional effect on exports. Thus, green technological innovation is bound to have an important impact on manufacturing-export resilience.
In summary, the existing research has laid a good foundation for this paper, but research on resilience in the economic field started late, and that research is more concentrated on the regional economy and urban economy. Therefore, there are still some problems that need to be discussed more deeply: Firstly, there are few empirical studies directly on export resilience, and there is a lack of identification and analysis of export resilience in the manufacturing industry. The existing research on export resilience is mostly based on the short-term perspective, focusing on the static timepoint analysis of the resistance and recovery ability of a single emergency without considering the long-term path derivation and industrial upgrading process. Secondly, the research on the influencing factors of export resilience is not sufficient, and the impact of exports on long-term slow disturbances (such as climate change, resource depletion) is not discussed in depth. Thirdly, the existing research has recognised the importance of improving the level of green technology innovation in the manufacturing industry, but there is little analysis on the mechanism of how green technology innovation acts on export trade.
So, what is the path of action for green technology innovation in affecting manufacturing-export resilience? From a supply-side perspective, technology innovation will certainly increase firm productivity [
32], reduce production costs, and enhance export competitiveness through price advantages. It has been shown in the literature that technological innovation is an important measure to optimise capital allocation efficiency in many industries [
33], and capital allocation efficiency largely affects firm productivity [
34], so green technology innovation is bound to have an impact on manufacturing-export resilience by changing the capital allocation efficiency. Based on this, this paper puts green technology innovation, capital allocation efficiency, and manufacturing-export resilience under the same research framework to explore whether green technological innovation can adjust the manufacturing production capacity to ensure long-term export resilience by optimising the capital allocation efficiency.
7. Conclusions
Taking the 2008 global financial crisis as an external shock, this paper empirically analyses the impact of green technology innovation on manufacturing-export resilience in the face of external shocks as well as the mechanism of its role. It not only has important reference significance and practical value for the implementation of green development strategy and intellectual-property protection policy in China but also provides an empirical basis for most developing countries to enhance manufacturing-export resilience. Our main conclusions are as follows:
Green technology innovation can significantly enhance manufacturing-export resilience, so we should actively improve the level of green technology innovation and cultivate new momentum for the development of manufacturing exports. The government should make special allocations to increase the investment in environmental protection research and development and establish green technology research and development centres mainly by enterprises and in cooperation with enterprises, universities and scientific research institutes. Developing countries should introduce advanced green technologies and equipment from developed countries, improve and update energy-consuming and highly polluting production equipment and processes, strengthen international energy technology cooperation and actively participate in international cooperation on clean development mechanism projects.
Green technology innovation can improve capital allocation efficiency, thereby enhancing manufacturing-export resilience. From the perspective of manufacturing enterprises, it is necessary to enhance the attention to the capital allocation situation, avoid capital mismatch, adjust capital allocation in time, and put the results of green technology innovation into practice. Manufacturing enterprises also need to actively build modern enterprise systems, improve corporate governance and supervision systems, improve the quality of capital investment, promote deeper integration with modern service industries, and reduce average operating costs. From the government’s perspective, it is necessary to rationalise intergovernmental financial relations, promote the modernisation of economic governance capacity, implement a coordinated development strategy, and focus on the coordinated development of the manufacturing industry and a reasonable division of labour.
In China’s high labour-mismatch regions, the enhancement of green technology innovation on manufacturing-export resilience is more significant compared with the low labour-mismatch regions, and the enhancement effect in the eastern–central region is also significantly higher than that in the western region. Labour factors still need to adapt to changes in technological progress and capital-factor allocation to achieve the appropriate ratio of factor allocation and to maximise the stimulation of the efficiency of capital allocation, so we need to further promote the reform of the labour-factor market to improve the degree of labour-factor mismatch. At the same time, a sound capital-factor market reduces the threshold of entry into and exit from the industry and promotes a more reasonable flow of capital, which weakens the inhibition of labour-factor mismatch on manufacturing exports, maximises the release of enterprise production potential, and optimises the way resources are allocated. The government should also create a good institutional and legal environment and perfect market mechanism according to the economic level of each region, with the aim of creating favourable conditions to ensure the effective implementation of green technology innovation activities and to effectively play a role in promoting the manufacturing-industry export trade.
Strengthening IPP by the government inhibits the enhancement of green technology innovation on manufacturing-export resilience. We should identify the differences with developed countries, formulate intellectual-property protection policies as appropriate, and establish a realistic intellectual-property protection system. Local governments should strengthen legislation in the field of IPP, establish a comprehensive legal system for IPP, accelerate the convergence with the international IPP system, and, at the same time, strike a proper balance between individual and social interests and dynamically adjust IPPR-related enforcement procedures or measures. When government intervention exceeds a certain limit, the impact of green technology innovation on manufacturing-export resilience will no longer be significant. Therefore, we should deal with the relationship between the market and the government, regulate the government’s administrative power, clarify the boundaries of government functions, adhere to the decisive position of the market in resource allocation, maximise the release of the potential of green technology innovation, and promote the development of manufacturing exports.
The research in this paper also has some limitations. This paper focuses on the changes in manufacturing exports in different regions of China and discusses the impact of green technology innovation on manufacturing-export resilience in each region. Considering the rich variety of manufacturing industries, further research can focus on analysing the impact of green technology innovation on the export resilience of each manufacturing sub-industry. In addition, this paper selects the output perspective to measure green technological innovation, but its scope is more complex, and further research should also give full consideration to the input perspective (such as R&D expenditure) to enrich the measurement method of green technology innovation.