International Competitiveness Of Service Trade In China On Trade In Value Added Terms

In 2015, China promulgated the first comprehensive document on the international development of service trade named "Several proposals on accelerating the development of service trade from the State Council". The document will help enhance the international competitiveness of China’s service trade and the international level of service trade, meanwhile it has important significance for leading the new normal of the economic development. Although the proportion of service trade of our country in 2013 was more than second industry’s and the scale of service trade has been growing rapidly, the fact that the trade deficit of service trade has been increasing has attracted the attention of scholars, especially research on the competitiveness of service trade in China. China’s total imports and exports of services was $604.34 billion in 2014, a 12.6% rise from 2013. The growth rate is much higher than 14.7%, the average level of global service trade. Among them, the service exports amounted to $222.21 billion, which increased by 7.6%. The service imports reached $382.1 billion, which increased by 15.8%. Service trade deficit widened to $159.93 billion. The WTO latest statistics show that China’s service exports and imports in the world accounted for 4.6% and 8.1% respectively, which ranked the fifth and second of the position accordingly in the world in 2014.The difference between service trade and goods trade makes the data statistics of the export of services trade more complicated. In addition, because of the different statistical methods and the continuous improvement of the relevant database, the export data of the service is constantly updated, which makes the service trade statistics in many countries, including China, more accurately reflect the competitiveness of certain nation’s service trade. Previous scholars have only evaluated a country’s service trade competitiveness with the index of competitiveness and also use of the input-output table from WIOD, GTAP, OECD, etc.to compute and estimate the development level of service trade. With the popularity of the value-added trade and global value chain theory, the value of value-added trade exports of service sector is as much attention as the manufacturing sector’s. The value of value-added trade exports of service sector is further used to calculation of the relevant index, then we can get the more precise Service trade competitiveness.While some scholars have used the value added of service trade, which from the value-added trade database jointly launched by OECD and WTO, to calculate the competitiveness index. They not only reevaluated the level of service competitiveness in China, but also further analyzed in the international context. What gives this thesis an updated idea is how much difference the various statistical algorithms of the service export volume exactly are? Are the competitiveness indices different based on corresponding service exports? Similarly, how different the level of service trade competitiveness is according to different exports of service?In order to answer the questions set three above, this thesis mainly expounds deliberately on them in the following six chapters:the first chapter is the introduction, it chiefly pointed out the research background and significance, the research methods and contents, the innovation and deficiency of this thesis and literature review. The literature review section is analyzed from three aspects about international competitiveness of service trade, which includes China’s total service trade on traditional trade terms, China’s major service sectors on traditional trade terms and based on value-added trade terms. Based on these three themes related literature review, the research target and structure of this thesis were formed. The second chapter introduces the basic model, research methods and the data sources. Specifically it first analyses value-added model, then decomposed the export of services value-added trade and adopted the service trade competitiveness evaluation index. Finally it further defines the research object of this thesis and the data sources. The third, fourth and fifth chapter are the parts of empirical study of this thesis. The third chapter introduce the present situation of the development of service trade in China, and then the development of China’s service trade is re-evaluated with the data of the previous years from updated database. The fourth and fifth chapter are further used to re-estimate the competitiveness of China’s total industry and major industry sectors, meanwhile they are made international comparison. The sixth chapter is the summary and suggestion part. Besides it summarized the main conclusions of this thesis according to different statistical algorithm, the relevant suggestions about enhancing competitiveness of service trade are put forward from the perspective of the superior service sector and the inferior service sector.The innovations of this thesis are mainly manifested in the following three aspects: First, the application of the research framework is combined with the updated OECD-WTO database to decompose the value-added export of the service,then compute the relevant competitiveness indices with the data to analyze the competitiveness of China’s service export and re-estimate the real level of the top ten economies of world’s business services export. Second, combining with the results of China’s service sector’s competitiveness, the paper divide China’s service sector into superior and junior service sectors and then present the countermeasures to enhance the competitiveness of the service trade. Third, relevant measures and suggestions are introduced combined different service sectors with the internet.The deficiency of this thesis contains three aspects:the first one is that the service related export data is not accurate. Because the service trade has the intangible, heterogeneous characteristics compared with the goods trade, the service trade statistics work of the countries in the world has not been improved and there are different statistical calibe of many service export. Secondly, the data used in this thesis is still relatively broad classification of the service department, if you use more detailed five digits data, the accuracy of the research might be improved. At last, the data in this thesis are not continuous and not the newest, which are only updated to the data in 2011 and can not indicate continuous change trend of China’s service trade competitiveness.