An Empirical Study On The Improvement Of China’s Position In The Global Value Chain-In The Perspective Of Export Commodities Upgrading

Since reform and opening up, China’s economy continues to grow at average more than 9.8% rate with the leap-forward development of foreign trade, which creates the miracle of the world economy. Especially since the 1990’s, the explosive growth of export trade has become one of the important impetuses of economic development in China. With the further spread of the new technology revolution and continuous deepening of the international specialization, China is being faced with unprecedented opportunities and challenges as the increasingly fierce competition approaches. Although the world economy recovery is still in the dark, China has called upon an ever-deeper transformation on domestic development and an ever-larger promotion on international competitiveness to mitigate the negative impact of global recession on the economic growth per se. These continuous shifts away from the traditional model dominated by export-oriented processing industries, which offered low value-added products mostly, will make it inevitably challenging to meet the strategic demands. Therefore, pursuing the dual marginal growth on quantity and extent of exports has become a necessity for products upgrading, which Gereffi (2005) defined as an ascending trend from low-end to high-end along the global value chain(GVC). What’s more, to make sure the precise status that China lies in the GVC is increasingly becoming a priority for further research on this issue.The traditional model of measuring the GVC position is mainly from the perspective of direct and indirect but each has advantages and disadvantages. It cannot fully reflect the changes and trends of the GVC position of our country. This paper gauges the GVC position of China with a comprehensive way of measure, which primarily based on the Kaplinsky Upgrading Index and "GVC Position Index". In this thesis, the dynamic relative unit value and market share changes of exports are taken to analyze the upgrading/downgrading trend as a joint index, both through intertemporal and international comparisons based on the micro-data of export flow. The results show that China is still in the low-end link of global value chain overall from 2002 to 2014, however a steady upward ascent in long cycle. The conclusion above is based on the following analysis. First, the proportion of intermediate goods export maintain more than 40% for a long time and the GVC position index measured by relative change index of intermediate goods export is hovering around 0.60, which show the up and down fluctuation in the short term while steady rise in the long term. Second but not the last, more than half of the export commodities are in a rising channel for the increase of the relative indicators of both export unit price and share, on which the big data calculation of commodities basket based. Meanwhile, downgrading goods only account for one over one thousand of the statistical sample so that they cannot reflect the overall changes trend.