Use of industrial robots and Chinese enterprises' export quality upgrading : evidence from China

Using the micro-level data on China’s export enterprises from 2005 to 2013, this paper discusses the impact of industrial robots on the quality upgrading of export products from two aspects: the change of enterprises’ costs and the structural effect of labor allocation. We find that there is a U-shaped relationship between the use of industrial robots and export products’ quality upgrading, but the enterprises whose robot applications exceed the U-shaped inflection point only account for 22.68%; in other words, most enterprises have not yet realized export products quality upgrading, and there exists a mismatched effect in the initial development stage. The results of mechanism analysis showed that industrial robots have significant effects on the costs and the structure of labor for export enterprises.