Analysis On The Bilateral Trade Complementarities Between China And ASEAN

The economic and trade relationships between China and ASEAN have developed very fastrecent years. The close cooperation and the ever-increasing trade between the two sides are basedon the strong bilateral complementarities of trade.This paper attempts to use the trade complementary index, the BALASSA's revealedcomparative advantage index and the intra-industry trade index to analyze the complementaritiesof trade between China and ASEAN. According to the analysis, there are two kinds of the tradecomplementarities between China and ASEAN countries: One is the trade complementarities thatcan be seen in the commodities of the trade such as energy, resources products and the agriculturalproducts;besides the complementarities in the commodities referred above, there are also themechanical and electrical products which reflects the complementarities of trade in theintra-industry trade.Besides the analysis of the complementarities of trade, some further explanations have beenmade for the reason for these two kinds of characteristics of the trading complementaritiesbetween China and ASEAN countries. Some theories of international trade such as the FactorEndowment Theory and the modern theory of the intra-industry theory have been quoted toanalyze the reason for the phenomenon.At last, a conclusion can be drawn from the analysis that the China and the ASEAN havevery strong trade complementarities which can benefit a lot for the bilateral sides. Some policysuggestions are therefore made based on the result of the research.