A Study On The International Competitiveness Of Jiangxi Textile Industry

Textile industry plays an important part in the development of Jiangxi economy and society. To investigate its international competitiveness can help us gain a better understanding of Jiangxi textile industry status quo and potential as well as guide us to put forward policy proposal aiming at improving its international competitiveness, thus facilitate its future progress, in the face of an increasingly complicated trade environment.At present, there are few studies on international competitiveness of Jiangxi textile industry, which chiefly focus on the effects of entering WTO, post-quota era on its growth, along with some macro qualitative description. Moreover, these studies, without mature theories and the support of evaluation methods are not enough. And since qualitative description is so less persuasive, deeper research on many aspects is needed. Basing on the existing limitations of current studies and learning from some relative research achievements, establishing qualitative and quantitative and gravity model analysis framework, this paper investigates Jiangxi textile industry in terms of import and export conditions, international competitiveness and its affecting factors.Export analysis emphasizes on export scale, structure, oversea market distribution, trade patterns and domestic Regional distribution. An intuitionistic and clear insight to export status quo and its changing situation is gained through vertical and targeted data comparison. In terms of qualitative analysis, this paper studies on the factors affecting Jiangxi textile international competitiveness basing on the perspective of supply capacity and market potential and then analyzes its trend of change. In terms of quantitative analysis, this paper uses imp&exp data evaluation method and productivity evaluation method to assess its international competitiveness. Based on previous qualitative and quantitative analysis, referring to the methods and framework by Redding and Venables (2004), this paper decomposes competitiveness into internal supply capacity and foreign market potential, and establishes a gravity model for Jiangxi textile industry. Using this model and panel data of Jiangxi textile, this paper estimate the two using coefficient obtained by regression analysis, and thus tells how the two contribute to textile export.A conclusion is that Jiangxi textile industry is in an overall good condition; export grows fast; general trade is the main way; competitiveness exists but faces weakening trend. It mainly produces labor intensive products, with competitiveness brought by cost advantage. Compared with other provinces, there is also a big gap. Moreover, low price advantage is increasingly weakened by RMB appreciation, tax refund adjustment policy, soaring price of raw materials, salary and energy. However the worrisome aspects are: low price, inferior quality, low productivity, low technology, without advantage in management, production cost and talent cultivation. In addition, due to low innovation ability and weak brand awareness, the products are highly homogeneous and easily replaced. Above all, gravity model reveals that internal supply capacity and foreign market potential do not contribute much to export, even not as much as transportation cost represented by length does, thus the two don’t bring out the best with much room left for improvement. Therefore, it’s an effective way to accelerate Jiangxi textile industry by enhancing internal supply capacity and foreign market potential.The main innovation of this paper is that we decompose competitiveness into internal supply capacity and foreign market potential. Currently gravity method is rarely used to analyze export advantage for China, not to speak of a single province. The advantage of this method lies in it can not only tell the dominant factors for export growth but also observe their degree of contribution.