On The Development Of China's Educational Service Trade

The General Agreement on Trade in Service (GATS) regards education as a part of service trade, and China's entry into WTO will definitely have extensive and profound influence on Chinese educational service. From the perspectives of economics, the paper analyzes the educational market's characteristics in such aspects as market structure, supply and demand. It analyzes the close relationship between educational service trade and national competitiveness to reveal the importance of educational service trade. Meanwhile, key factors as human capital, life cycle of educational service, cost and benefit, etc, constitute the educational service trade's international competitiveness. Based on a large amount of data, the paper analyzes the development of Chinese educational service trade from four modes of service trade (Cross-border supply, Consumption abroad, Commercial presence and Presence of natural persons), and makes comparative analysis between china and developed countries on educational service competitiveness, export scale and policy factors. The educational trade service in China has enjoyed a rapid growth in recent years, while the enormous adverse balance of trade and the large gap needed filling both reflect that the whole international competitiveness of our education industry is still relatively weak. To develop our country's educational service trade, what have to be done is to change ideas, improve all the participants' performance, exert the original advantage to promote education export, utilize education import effectively to create new comparative advantage.