Abstract: Relative to the absolute quantity of export trade, the technological structure of export trade, i.e. the influence of technological complexity on long-term economic growth, is more important; under different institutional quality, the advantage of factor endowment on export technological complexity may be different. Based on the threshold regression model, this paper mainly examines the relationship between factor endowment and export technology complexity in different institutional environments by using the export product data of 104 countries from 2002 to 2016.The empirical test shows that the influence of factor endowment on the export technology complexity has an institutional threshold effect. When the level of economic liberalization is lower than the threshold, the export technology complexity has no significant relationship with factor endowment,while when the level of economic liberalization increases to the threshold value, the technical complexity of a country′s export can effectively reflect its factor endowment characteristics. Therefore, from the perspective of improving the export technology complexity, when a country′s factor endowment tends to be high-end, a more liberal economic policy should be adopted; when a country′s factor endowment is at the low-end state, taking free economic policies may have the potential to lock in low-end exports. On the contrary, proper government regulation can effectively promote the export technology complexity.

Key words: export technology complexity, factor endowment, institution quality, threshold effect