"Price-performance Ratio" Of China's Manufacturing Exports Product:A Crosscountry Comparison

The transition of international division of production from inter-industry division and intra-industry division to global value chain division has brought about a rapid increase in international trade volume.Under the mode of global value chain division,developing economies can take advantage of their low cost of labor force and other factors to participate in intra-product international division of production,thus their development of foreign trade is particularly rapid.The most prominent representative of the rapid growth of foreign trade in developing economies is China.Since the 1980 s,especially after the accession to the WTO,China's export trade has enjoyed a tromendous growth.The great achievements made by “Made in China” in the international market have attracted wide attention and become an important topic in the field of international trade.As for the explanation of the miracle of China's export growth,the early point of view is to explain it from price and quality respectively.In view of the fact that neither price nor quality can explain the situation of China's export growth well,the recent literature has begun to integrate quality and price factors to explain China's export growth from the “priceperformance ratio”.In consideration that the existing “price-performance ratio” literature has the shortcomings of only focus on the “price-performance ratio” of China's exports itself and did not compare with it's main competitors,this paper extends the study of “priceperformance ratio” to the perspective of international comparison,and raises the questions that need to be studied,that is,where is the “price-performance ratio” of China's exports lies compareto other main developing economies.Whether China has an advantage in “priceperformance ratio” of it's exports compare to major developing countries? What is the relative condition of the “price-performance ratio” of China's exports to other developing economies in different types of industries? On the basis of summarizing the characteristic facts of the international comparison of “price-performance ratio”,this paper explores the mode of “price-performance ratio” competition in major developing countries.This paper uses the index decomposition method of Hallak and Schott(2011)to calculate the “price-performance ratio” of industrial exports,and improves the method of estimating the Impure price index.Specifically,the Fisher index adjusted by EKS method is used as the estimates the Impure price index.By using the EKS adjusted Fisher index,this paper simplifies the estimating method without affecting the estimating effect.In the process of decomposing the Impure price index and estimating the Export quality index,innovations have been made in the selection of the trade cost indicator.Novy(2012)method is used to calculate the bilateral trade cost of sample countries and the trade cost indicator calculated by this method is considered more comprehensive.Using a sample covers 26 major developing countries including BRICS countries,Southeast European countries,Latin American and Southeast Asian countries,this paper estimates the export “price-performance ratio” index of 13 manufacturing sub-industries from 1998 to 2015,compares the “priceperformance ratio” according to the estimated results,and draws the following conclusions:Firstly,in terms of the vertical change of the “price-performance ratio” of China's manufacturing exports,the export “price-performance ratio” of 13 sub-industries showed an upward trend from 1998 to 2015.The growth rates of each sub-sector were not consistent.Overall,the growth rates of capital-intensive industries and low-and medium-tech-intensive industries were faster,while the growth rates of labor-intensive industries and high-techintensive industries were slower.Secondly,in the international horizontal comparison of the “price-performance ratio” of exports from different manufacturing industries,the level of “price-performance ratio” of exports from various industries not only experienced the development from below the industry average to above the industry average in 1998-2015,but also completed the surpassing of major developing countries,becoming one of the leaders and even the top leader in the competition of “price-performance ratio”.Finally,from the perspective of the driving factors of the change of “price-performance ratio” of export products,the improvement of “price-performance ratio” of China's manufacturing export products mainly comes from the improvement of export quality,which belongs to the quality-driven “price-performance ratio”,but from the perspective of horizontal comparison,the “price-performance ratio” of China's manufacturing export products can surpass the major developing countries,except for the reasons of quality improvement.In addition,the sustained maintenance of export price advantage is also an important reason.Maintenance of price advantage and improvement of quality level have jointly created the leading position of “price-performance ratio” of China's manufacturing export products.