A Study On The Features Of U.S. Service Trade Patterns

This dissertation studies the features of U.S. service trade and the characteristic and effect of its supportive policy, making the comparative static and dynamic analysis about the patterns of U.S. service trade with the help of data from 11 service trade departments since 1980. The analysis is mainly about revealed comparative advantage, international competitiveness and intra-industry trade. That choosing this research topic is because of the following three reasons.1. Service trade has become an increasingly important part of international trade and the indispensable new power of world economic growth.2. It is a real task for China to consider how to boost the promotion and adjustment of industrial structure, taking the advantage of service trade. 3. As a power of world service trade, U.S. provides a favorable institutional environment for the steady development of service trade by using its active supportive policy. U.S. has already had the experiences and found the internal rules of service trade. It is both theoretically and practically meaningful for China to use U.S. as a reference, to adjust service trade policies, boost its development, optimize its structure and service industry structure, accelerate steady transformation of the economic development pattern.Besides the necessary introduction and conclusion, this research mainly investigates and answers four parts of issues. First, compared to the world service trade development, what is the feature of the development of American service trade and its supportive policy? What kind of promoting effect did service trade have on the U.S. macro-economy development? Second, what is the characteristic of service trade pattern and how it evolutes in history? What factors shape and promote the development of service trade pattern? Third, what are the dynamic characteristics of American's service trade pattern evolution. How these dynamic characteristics reflect the trend and regularity? Fourth, American service trade has some experiences and lessons. While China is adjusting trade structure and trade pattern, transferring economic growth mode, what beneficial reference and enlightenment can we learn? In order to answer the above series of questions, this research is structurally divided into six chapters. Main viewpoints are as follows.The first chapter is the introduction. Based on raising the core problem and analyzing the theoretical and practical significance, we make some necessary demarcation about connotation and extension among the three key conceptions: service trade, trade structure, and trade pattern. In this chapter, we also put foreign scholar's relative studies into shape and summarize the inadequacies of existing studies, in order to make sure the direction this study breaks through. In addition, this chapter discusses four aspects of innovation of this dissertation:study method, study subject, way of thinking, and research field.The second chapter is the Theory of International Trade in Services. This chapter theoretically sketches out five points:the industrial foundation of service trade, the relation between international service trade and international trade in goods, the traditional theory of service trade, the international service trade from the perspective of the new trade theory, the liberalization in the field of service trade, and trade protectionism. The main purpose of this chapter is to analyze the intrinsic logic of international service trade development, in order to lay a solid foundation and provide scientific and reasonable analysis tool for empirical research. The key conclusion of this chapter are as follows:the international division of labor and international trade theory, based on the comparative advantage, applies to analysis of trade in services, although service trade in many aspects different from the goods trade, and some scholars have tried to construct the new theory of service trade. Because the service trade is more susceptible to various policy factors, trade policy analysis must be emphasized in the study. The most important meaning of the conclusion is to provide a theory basis for the revealed comparative advantage and analysis method of trade competitiveness.The third chapter is The Development of U.S. Service Trade. The discussion is from five aspects. The first is to conclude the characteristics of contemporary service trade:fast development, regional imbalance, increasing importance of outsourcing service, the coexisting of liberalization and trade barriers, and closely combining with international direct investment. The second is to examine the development situation of American trade after the war, dividing it into three main stages. The author summarizes four aspects of features of the U.S. service trade development, embodying in:high level of overall development, reasonable service structure, trade surplus is mainly from direct investment, export mainly to developed and newly industrialized countries. The third is the U.S. service trade policy, which features are: actively promote the strategy of export service priority, have bilateral and multilateral talks to expand international market, cooperate with non-governmental organizations to provide quality services for service enterprises. The fourth is to do initial investigation about U.S. import and export trade service product structure and national structure. The fifth is to investigate, in three aspects, the role that American service trade plays in the development of national economy, using the method of measurement analysis. From the investigation, we see that the vigorous development of service trade not only increases the country's economic openness, but also directly impetus the growth of GDP and employment, playing a viral role in American industry structure and employment structure adjustment.The forth chapter is Characteristics and Motivation of American Service Trade Pattern. This chapter is a further analysis of American trade pattern from three aspects: revealed comparative advantage, trade competitiveness, and intra-industry trade. Through the horizontally and vertically comparative analysis, we theoretically examine the internal reason of existence the features of American service trade pattern. First of all, revealed comparative advantage index analysis indicates that America has strong comparative advantage in knowledge intensive service, such as "special permission and license fee", and capital intensive service, such as "finance" and "insurance". But in the "computer services" it has transformed from the comparative advantage to comparative disadvantages. Next, trade competitiveness index analysis shows that the U.S. has stronger competition in finance, insurance and building fields; its computer service trade change from surplus to deficit since 2006, reflecting that American goes through a relatively profound change in participating the international division of labor and trade service pattern. Thirdly, the index of industry's inner trade analysis indicates that U.S. has a high degree of intra-industry trade in areas such as transportation, telecommunication, other commercial service and government service, but low in its financial, insurance, building and personal cultural recreation and other export strongly competitive industries. From the reason of service trade pattern's formation and evolution, important factors that determine the U.S. service trade pattern are:average per capita income level, the scale of economy, trade barriers, and human capital. The fifth chapter is Dynamic Analysis of U.S. Service Trade Model. Trying to identify the direction of trade pattern changes, variations, and the path of time change, this chapter uses the method of dynamic to analyze the change of three kinds of American service trade pattern index. The first is to use the Galtonian Regression Method to check out the Cantwell Effect about trade pattern change. We find out that no matter from which angle American service trade pattern has the trend of scattering, showing that the degree of specialization of service trade is decreasing. Secondly, by using the Lawrence Index, which is used to calculate import and export, to measure trade pattern's amplitude of fluctuation, it is obvious to see that American's overall service exports and imports adjustment is in roughly equal range, but the specific industry difference is also quite obvious. Thirdly, the diagrams analysis of service trade pattern changes also show that different services trade departments, instead of having common trend, have very different time paths. This fact means that we must differentiate our implementation of supportive policy on service trade among different service industries. Instead of simply distribute limited policy resources equally, we should give key support to the industries which have comparative advantage or have important strategic significance.The sixth chapter is Comparative Study of the Bilateral Service Trade. From bilateral service trade scale and the trade volume's change in main industries, we can see the increase of bilateral trade between U.S. and China. But different main industries have different development:labor-intensive service trade has bigger development fluctuation; capital-intensive service trade develops smoothly; others, such as technology-intensive service trade, develop slowly, due to the limitation of America's trade policy. From point of the Sino-US bilateral trade strength and development trend, China's new markets mainly in the service sector; the service trade cooperation will expand; bilateral trade will surely get further development and become the new fulcrum in the Sino-US economic and trade relations. From the perspective of industry inner trade level, Sino-US trade pattern shows the trend of intra-industry trade, having certain level of labor division. However, there are still certain gaps existed, when China and U.S. are compared with the world overall level of intra-industry service trade. Among service trade industries, there is a big difference in Sino-US intra-industry trade level; horizontal division of labor-intensive service trade products is obvious, while capital-intensive and technology-intensive service trade products are still inter-industry trade and vertical intra-industry trade.The last chapter is the conclusion of this research and policy suggestions. Based on the retrospect and the analysis, main conclusions are obtained:Through analysis of American service trade pattern policy orientation, this dissertation gets the role that government supporting plays in the development of service trade. This dissertation also makes quantitative analysis on service trade pattern, U.S. economic growth, and employment of services. These lead to the conclusion that service trade has a growing importance in the economic development, which is closely related to the growth of national economy, especially effective on the efficiency and quality growth of economic. In recent years, because the service trade policy is relatively loose, the service trade openness indicator is relatively gentle. But in absolute terms, that service trade openness above 10% is of a high level. American trade service has a relatively small range of fluctuation. Bilateral service trade, mainly the trade among industries, between China and U.S is to be further strengthened; Sino-US service trade is strongly complementarily.For China's development of service trade policy, aiming at some basic work in the development of service trade, we need to accelerate policy transparency, to make more optimal guidance catalogue of the service trade development, and to establish more open strategy of service trade development. In addition, the development of service trade still needs more powerful supportive policy.