Study On The Structure And Its Relative Advantage Of China’s Agricultural Product Export

Trade structure has always been the research focus of international trade theory. During the production of trade goods, not only combinations of different production factors, but also different technologies being used, so the technological differences between different economies are very important for explaining the differences of trade structure. Especially in recently years, technological progress is gradually becoming the most important factor which determines the international competitiveness of economies’export, and as the important part of economies’factor endowment, the effect of technological progress and technological level and itself also largely determine the export scale and it’s growth quality and the export structure and it’s optimization level, by affecting the combination and structure of factors and the allocative efficiency of factors. In recently years, the research focus of international trade theory has already transferred from export quantity to export’s internal structure, and the export technological structure is one of the very important research areas. Since joining the WTO, China has accelerated the pace of liberalization of agricultural trade. Trade liberalization theory proposed that, the development of trade liberalization would promote trade participating countries adapt their agricultural production in accordance with the principle of comparative advantage, and the self-reinforcing mechanism of market would promote the further improvement of trade specialization, but which would also make economies achieve specialization in low-end industries. Therefore, China should continually enhance the international competitiveness of its agricultural products, and promote the continuous upgrade of export structure and steady growth of export scale of its agricultural products, and which is the inevitable choice for China to avoid its agriculture and exports of agricultural products being low-end in the international division of global agricultural value chain.This study comprehensively applies several research methods, which include research methods of trade comparative advantage and growth prospect, technological value-add measurement method, convergence test methods and trade structure analysis methods based on technological distribution of trade goods, to make in-depth exploration of the export structure and comparative advantage and their dynamic characteristics of China’s agricultural products under the background of economic globalization and trade liberalization, by analyzing the export structure of China’s agricultural products and the comparative advantage and growth prospect of agricultural trade of China and its major trade paterners, and studying the technological level and technological structure and their evolution characteristics and also comparing with major countries from the perspective of export technological value-added. This study not only enriches and expands the empirical research on China’s agricultural trade and technological structure of foreign trade from the research content, research perspective and the usage of research methods, but also helps to sort out the relative position of China’s agriculture and agricultural trade in the international division of global agricultural value chains and the ability to obtain the benefits of agricultural trade and their changes, and which can provide reality reference and decision-making basis for China to develop agricultural trade development strategy for continually enhancing the international competitiveness of agricultural exports and steadily expanding the agricultural exports scale in the new situation.The main conclusions of this study are as follow:(1) China’s agricultural export structure has totally shown a variety of variation. (2) There are strong complementaries in the agricultural trade between China and USA, Japan, ASEN, EU, MERCOSUR and India as a whole, and strong complementaries also exit in the world market and main export markets. (3) There are close agricultural trade ties between China and USA, Japan, ASEN, EU, MERCOSUR and India, which means that the growth potential of agricultural trade is large. (4) There are unconditional a divergence, unconditional β convergence and conditional β convergence for the technological value-added of selected developed countries, and unconditional a convergence, unconditional β convergence and conditional β convergence for that of selected developing countries. Both unconditional β convergence rate and conditional β convergence rate of export technological structure of selected developing countries are significantly higher than that of selected developed countries. (5) Export technological structure of China’s agricultural products totally achieves significant upgrade. The export proportion of high-tech and above-medium-tech agricultural products appears further increase in total, basically steady for medium-tech agricultural products, significant decrease for low-medium-tech agricultural products, and still high for low-tech agricultural products. (6) The overall export technological value-added of China’s agricultural products keeps rising, but there is still a wide gap compared with selected developed countries. Compared with selected developing countries, the rising speed of overall export technological value-added of China’s agricultural products are not strong, and the "late-mover advantage" that catches up with selected developed countries is not obvious. (7) Export technological structure of agricultural products of China and main selected developed countries and developing countries are mainly complementary. (8) Export technological structure of agricultural products of China has stronger comparative pressure on that of main selected developed countries and developing countries in the international market.