Research On Factors Affecting The Export Competitiveness Of China’s Higher Education Service Trade

In the mid-1990s, the World Trade Organization formally brought education into the areas of trade in service. With the rapid growth of international trade in service, trade structure gradually changed into knowledge-intensive and technology-intensive industries, trade in education service occupies a pivotal position. The import and export situation of higher education service trade not only reflects a country’s economic, political, technological and other aspects of the comprehensive national strength to a certain extent, and also marks the country’s degree of internationalization of education services, but also represents a country’s overall level of education and competitiveness. However, the late start of higher education service trade, the big gap compared with developed countries and the long-term deficit, which are seriously hindering the development of trade in higher education service of our country.This article dose some research about existing literatures, combining with relevant WTO rules, then makes a choice and analysis about the influencing factors which make some effect on the long-term deficit in the higher education service trade. According to Porter’s Competitive Advantage of Nations and on the basis of the relevant literatures, makes research hypothesis from five influencing factors which include the student-teacher ratio in higher education, the gross enrollment rate of colleges and universities, the ratios of educational funds expenditure with R&D expenditure to GDP, and per capita GDP, respectively from production factors, factors of government and other aspects. On the premise, the article uses time series data from1992to2011to make empirical analysis about the influencing factors which make some effect on competitiveness of higher education service trade in China. At last, according to the results of empirical analysis, the article makes some relevant policies and suggestions to promote the development of China’s higher education service trade:increasing the government spending, improving the education service trade laws and regulations; enhancing the faculty, enhancing the quality of educational services; further improving the gross enrollment rate of higher education, to improve the situation of supply and demand imbalance; optimizing the structure of foreign students to display the role of traditional disciplines of comparative advantage and doing good education service international marketing actively.