Measurement Of Barriers To Trade In Services Of China

Since the1970s, the development of trade in services played animportant role in international trade and trade in service has become thedriver of trade growth and the economic growth. There are tremendousliteratures studying on trade barriers. Given the intrinsic problem ofattaching at-the-border-barriers to trade in intangibles, relatively littleprogress has been made up to date despite various serious and appliedefforts to measure restrictions in services trade. It is no doubt that themeasurement of trade barriers in service trade can help policy makers toclearly understand the trade picture.In this thesis, we firstly draw the picture of the status quo of China’strade in services, and make a deep systemize of existing research both athome and abroad to find out suitable tools and methods to measure thebarriers. Based on gravity model of Anderson and Francois,we use Chinaand nineteen major bilateral trading partners trade import data during theperiod2000-2011, through a two-stage hybrid model regression, finallycalculate the barrier into tariff equivalents.The results show that Hong Kong, the United States, Japan, Belgiumand the Netherlands have relatively low service barriers, while Chinamainland has a relatively high barrier in service trade, especially intelecommunications, insurance and financial sectors.