A Study Of Chinese Foreign Trade Interest In New Trade Statistics Systems

In the context of economic globalization, factors of production such as capital, raw materials and intermediate products can freely flow between countries with increasing scale and proportion, which is a huge challenge for traditional theory and trade statistics interests.First of all, the basic assumption "no free flows of production factors" in traditional trade has an increasingly departure from reality, which Limits its explanatory power for real-world problem. Second, with the deepening international division of labor and developed intermediate products trade, there is a widespread phenomenon of trade diversion, trade reentry and international industrial cycle. In such cases, still applying "gross caliber" customs statistics to reflect a country’s trade interests is not accurate, on the one hand, it will inflate trade volume because of trade reentry, on the other hand, it may distort trade imbalance on account of trade diversion. Third, it is more difficult to differentiate national trade interest for the reason of foreign capital’s ownership. The above problems are more prominent in China, because as known as the so-called factory of the world, it has a large amount of processing and intermediate products trade, a growing amount of FDI and plenty of trade frictions. Therefore, this dissertation will build a new way of trade statistics to identify relationships between foreign investment and trade and push the value of foreign input factor out of total export value by the method of trade in value-added, which is conducive to more accurate and objective understanding the scale of China’s foreign trade interests and its value composition. Then, it further discusses the driving factors for trade growth and influencing factors for driving the growth in trade and determinants of the promotion of value-added in export trade from manufacturing sector, and puts forward policy suggestions for better development of Chinese foreign trade. Specific studies include the following six parts with a total of eight chapters.The first part includes chapter 1,2 and 3. It explains the research background and significance, reveals the huge challenge from widespread phenomenon of intermediate products trade and free flows of capital factors. Then, it discusses the origin, distribution and measurement of modern trade interest, and introduces new phenomena, characteristics and problems.The second part (including chapter4) is about Chinese ownership-based foreign trade interest. Taking FDI,OFDI, ownership structure and the availability of data into account, this section constructs ownership-based two-country unilateral trade model and three-country bilateral trade model and measures trade scale and balance between China and the world and Sino-US in 1998-2011. Results show that:foreign-invested enterprises in China which have a very significant trade substitution are important driving forces for Chinese huge trade surplus, with a half level of contribution. That is a very serious phenomenon.The third part (including chapter5) is about Chinese foreign trade interest from the perspective of value-added in trade. By using world input-output tables, this section constructs two-country unilateral and bilateral value-added trade models and deconstructs value composition of import and export at three levels (including total trade, industry and business). It tends to empirical analyze the real impact of trade intermediate goods trade on Sino-US trade scale and imbalance. It finds that:nearly a quarter of China’s total exports is contributed by foreign elements, which are concentrated in the United States, Japan, South Korea, China Taiwan and other countries and regions; labor-intensive industries has a higher value-added rate than technology-intensive one; Sino-US trade value is similar to this constitution, while most of the services sector are in the state of deficit.The fourth part (including chapter6) is about Chinese foreign trade interest from the perspective of trade in value-added. The method of trade in value-added contains two perspectives of production and consumer, and the perspective of consumer can study import and export from final demand. In view of Robert Stehrer (2012), this section constructs one-country unilateral and bilateral trade in value-added models. Results indicate that:in 1995-2011, China’s average value added in trade changed as follows:imports fell by 29.8%, exports declined by 23.8%, total trade declined by 26.5%, but trade balance unchanged; while, bilateral trade imbalance had a big move, Sino-US average trade surplus declined by 17%.The fifth part (including chapter7) is about influences on Chinese foreign trade interest. First, by the method of SDA, this section decomposes influences on the change of trade in value-added into nine aspects, analyzes each one concretely and concludes that:world economic growth gives a powerful guarantee for Made in China, and increased demand from China is the principal propellant in value-added import growth. Second, given the dependent variable, explanatory variables and dummy variables, this section does the empirical analysis by the methods of pooled regression, fixed effect and generalized least squares method. Results show that:escalating Chinese position in international division of labor is conducive to more trade interest, both the level of industrial burden and export technological sophistication have a positive correlation with export value added.The sixth part (including chapter8) is conclusions, recommendations and outlook. It summarizes main conclusions of the dissertation and puts forward some suggestions combining with the conclusions, such as attaching great importance to building new trade statistics systems, further developing FDI, cultivating and introducing quality factors, improving the structure of factor endowment, promoting the transformation of trade structure and status in international division of labor, appropriately tackling trade disputes. Finally it points out the limitation and directions for future research.