Study On Liberalization Of Service Trade And Change Of Industrial Structure In Global Perspective

With the development of the economic globalization and the adjustment of the international industrial structure, the world service trade has experienced a rapid development. Since the “General Agreement on Trade in Services” was eventually signed in 1994, the service trade has been growing rapidly, its development is much faster than that of trade in goods, and the focus of the international competition also shifts gradually from goods trade to service trade. However, the development of service trade is quite unbalanced in countries, developed countries such as the United States and Britain have mature service industry and dominate the international service market, while the developing countries like China are still suffering from the deficit of the service trade. What is the difference between countries? In some developed countries and regions in Europe and America, the service industries, or so called the tertiary industries, are the largest component of the national economy, and the service industries are their main driving force of the growth of economy and employment. But some developing countries represented by China still focus on the primary and the secondary industry. Whether these differences are related to the openness of service trade? Will the liberalization of service trade promote the change of industrial structure?This thesis discusses the questions talked above from theoretical and practical aspects. We discuss the development of service industry and the industrial structure. We also analyze the transmission mechanism of the service trade liberalization and the industrial structure change using the theory of industrial structure and comparative advantage. We measure the service trade barriers using the gravity model and investigate the connection of trade openness, industrial structure and the economic growth using the panel vector autoregressive model.There are several innovations in this thesis. First, for the first time, we study the transmission mechanism of the service liberalization and the change of industrial structure. Second, we add the country-time two way fixed effect into the classical gravity model, and use the new model to measure the barriers to the service trade. Third, we use the panel VAR model and the Granger test to analyze the transmission chain for the barriers to service trade, the change of industrial structure and the economy growth. Forth, we select three variables—human capital, physical capital and technology as the intermediary variables to study how the service liberalization drive the change of the industrial structure.The first chapter is the introduction, where we introduce the background, purposes, theoretical and practical meanings, main methods and the structure of the thesis. The second chapter is the theoretical study, where we introduce and analyze the theory of the liberalization of service trade, the industrial structure change and their transmission mechanism. Firstly, we introduce the concept and the theory of the service trade barriers, then the concept and theory of the industrial structure upgrade, including the classical and the latest studies by domestic and foreign scholars. After that, we analyze the transmission mechanism from service trade development to the industrial structure upgrade from the theoretical perspective.The third chapter is the analysis of the present situation of global service trade development and industrial structure change. The present situation of the development of service trade mainly includes the scale and the speed of the development, the import and export of the services, the differences among service sectors structures, the competitiveness and the level of liberalization. The current situation of the industrial structure change includes the output change and the employment change.The forth chapter is the empirical test, we measure the service trade barriers of many countries and regions. We use the gravity model based on the two-way fixed effects to estimate the barriers and compare our model to the traditional model. The outcomes are used in the next chapter. The fifth chapter is the second part of the empirical test. We analyze the connection of service trade barriers, industrial structure and the economic growth with the panel VAR model, mediator effect test, which is based on the real data.In the last chapter, the main conclusions are given. According to these conclusions we provide the policy advices on how to set the liberalization project for the service trade and how to promote the industrial structure. We also propose the direction for the future researches.