Research On The Trade Structure Of China-ASEAN Free Trade Area

Since 90's in 20 centuries, the trade relations between China and ASEAN have been improved continuously, the value in trade has been enlarged, China and ASEAN have became the important partners in trade each other. In November 2002, China and ASEAN achieved an agreement that the two sides will establish China-ASEAN Free Trade Area (shorted for CAFTA) till 2010. CAFTA is the first regional economic integration organization that China joined formally, which is also the regional economic integration organization consisting mainly of developing countries. Since that, the relations between China and ASEAN have been much closer, the trade structures have been changed much more.The trade structure of the CAFTA is the study object of this paper, which analyses the problem by using the statistics and the indexes concerned and so on. This paper is divided into three parts: The first part, according to the trade statistics of China and ASEAN, analyses the value and the trade structure between them. The second part makes use of the revealed comparative advantage index to analyses the advantage of different merchandise of China and ASEAN, and studies the complementarities and the competition in the trade structures. In this part, there are two kinds of the trade complementarities between China and ASEAN. On one hand, because of the difference in comparative advantage between the different commodities of every country, the trade complementarities exist. On the other hand, by using the intra-industry index, the trade complementarities in the intra-industry trade can be analyzed. The last part, this paper gives some suggestions to improve the economic development of China and ASEAN, based on the trade complementarities and the trade competition.