Analysis On Correlation Between China’s Maritime Service Trade And Goods Trade

With the advance of economic globalization, China’s goods trade relying onmaritime transport has been flourishing. Just a few decades, China’s goods tradevolume has ranked the world and the surplus has been expanding in recent years interms of comparative cost advantage. However, the development of maritime servicetrade as the important way of transferring cargoes differed from that of the goodstrade. Compared with goods trade, because of the factors of lately and slowdevelopment and ignorance, the maritime service trade faced many problems duringthe process, such as large number of companies but low quality, over-capacity, poorinfrastructure and low service ability. And China’s maritime service trade laggedbehind the developed countries in terms of technology, service and related laws,resulting in the poor competitiveness and long-term deficit state. Therefore, with thepremise of the existing literatures, the article based on the current status of maritimeservice trade and goods trade analyzed the world and China’s development of tradeand highlighted the differences and complementarities of maritime service trade andgoods trade, both theoretically and empirically. It was based on the theory ofproduction blocks and service links, Deardorff model, the theories of derived demandand comparative advantage. This article aimed at proposing some helpful suggestionsto the development of China’s trade.Firstly, the trend of world maritime service trade development showed theconsistent characteristics with the goods trade, and they were both influenced by theglobal financial crisis. Besides, different economics existed the discrepancies,reflecting in the advantage of maritime service trade of developed countries and theadvantage of goods trade of undeveloped countries. In addition, the trade dependenceof developing and transition economies to the developed economics was higher,deeply influenced by the economic situations of developed countries. China’s totalgoods trade kept high growth, forming the trade pattern of industrial products as themain trading partner. And the maritime service trade had three characteristics: thetrade volume growth and deficit expansion coexisted; the large ship scale andover-capacity in the situation of weak economy coexisted; above-scale portthroughput increase and inadequate port infrastructure coexisted.Secondly, the maritime trade in service and trade in goods were reflected indifferences characteristics. The in tangible service and tangible trade made theirfactors different in the process of development; the maritime service trade belonged tothe third industry but the goods trade belonged to the second industry, so they weredifferent in the form of input and output and added value. Compared with goods trade, China’s maritime service trade had weaker competitiveness and different degree ofopenness; in addition, our country stressed the goods trade and had less policy support.Therefore, above factors resulted in the inevitable differences. But from the analysisof the development of the correlation, there were complementarities between them,such as the derived and auxiliary demand to the goods trade and both affected by theglobal trade. The results of the empirical analysis showed that the elasticity of goodstrade to the maritime service trade was1.222in the long term, indicating that thegrowth of goods trade had positive effect on the service trade from the perspective oftotal trade volume. And it also showed that the elasticity was1.023in the short termand the error correction coefficient was0.8370. From the import and export volume,the pulling effect of export of goods trade to the export of maritime service trade was2.684, and the inhibitory effect to the import of it was1.342; the pulling effect ofimport of goods trade to the import of maritime service trade was1.137. Additionally,the coefficient calculation result of different economics showed that although thedifferent countries had different degree of development, their trade correlationcoefficient were quite high, demonstrating the complementarities between them.Finally, based on the above study, I gave some suggestions from the aspects ofenterprise, government and industry association. For the shipping enterprise, theyshould improve the comparativeness by the means of improving the technology,adjusting the shipping scale and fleet structure and making the professionalconstruction of ports; the goods enterprise were aimed at improving the quality ofgoods and balancing the import and export, for the purpose of realization of trade ingoods leading to the development of maritime service trade. For the government, theyshould give the policy support and trade system support. And the industry associationcan play the professional role, establishing the information public and sharingplatform and providing the industry dynamics.