Analysis On The Committed Openness Of China’s Service Market

Since entering the new century, the rapid development of trade in services has become a striking phenomenon in the international economy, so countries around the world have strengthened the research of service and attached great importance to the development of service trade. Clearly, the core competition in the international market has converted from goods trade to service, and the economic focus, correspondingly, begins to shift from manufacturing to service. The level of service development has become a key indicator to measure the level of economic development for a country. At the same time, the status of service in the economic structure is rising rapidly, which can be demonstrated by the increasing service output. According to the statistics provided by UNCTAD(United Nations Conference on Trade and Development), service industry has accounted for74.3%and51.1%of GDP in developed countries and developing countries respectively in2009. With the strengthening of globalization, liberalization of trade in services has become an irreversible trend and only countries conform to this trend to open their service market gradually, can they obtain more benefits from the international unit market.At the same time, friction among countries in the field also increased. General Agreement on Trade in Service (GATS) first developed a set of international norms all participating countries should follow, in order to phase out all barriers which hinder the access to service trade market and provide foreign service and service provider the treatment not worse than the nationals. The ultimate goal is to realize the full liberalization in services.GATS as a multilateral rule did not require all the members to fully liberalize their service market at the beginning. Considering the huge gap between developed countries and developing countries, the members can make open commitments according to their domestic situation. GATS provides special care to the developing countries in order to enhance their competition ability and involves them into the process of service trade liberalization gradually, because the broad participation of developing counties can make the progress more smooth. Since the time of the establishment of General Agreement on Tariff and Trade (GATT), GATS has became another breakthrough to promote the development of world trade liberalization and paved a solid road for the service liberalization.In fact, GATS itself is a result of mutual balance and compromise among the interests of all parties, which can reflect in the Schedule of Specific Commitments submitted by participating countries. The Commitment as an inseparable part of the GATS embodies the attitude held by the members to open their service markets. Therefore, the analysis of a country’s commitment to service markets can help to acquire the information about its open policy and reflect the degree of its dependence on the international market.There’s no doubt for the positive effects of the global economic integration, but the excessive exposure to the international environment will also bring in adverse impact on the country’s economy. In order to make full use of the benefits the international market brings and reduce the negative influence, countries in the process of liberalization set up kinds of barriers at different level to ensure that the opening degree can correspond to the market maturity. So, how to grasp the "degree" of openness has become the priority for countries to formulate foreign policy.This paper uses the measurement method of Hoekman and the fixed frequency measurement method to analyze the committed openness of the service market in our country, finding that there is wide discrepancy in the result among different service departments, which indicates that our country adopts the selective protection strategy in the field of service. This paper consists of three parts. The first part is the chapter one, which mainly introduces the significance of this study, and collects the relevant researches to clarify the achievements which have been obtained, at the same time, the research methods used in this paper are also introduced in this part. The second part is the following three chapters. The chapter two and three are based on the Schedule of Specific Commitments submitted by China and apply Hoekman index to measure the commitment to openness of service market in China. The chapter four takes the strength of restriction into account, and modifies the traditional method to re-measure the commitment to openness. The last part of this paper is the chapter five, which gives a simple summarization for this study and comes to two inspirations.