The Factor Intensity Of China's Import And Export And The Foundation Of Its Comparative Advantage

According to the theory, if one industry of a country is able to export abroad, it should have comparative advantage, and if the ratio of the export of this industry to the total export of its country accounts for larger than that of the whole world trade, we can recognize that this country has some comparative advantage compared with others in the world scale. The Index of Revealed Comparative Advantage,RCA,takes advantage of this character in observing and studying a country's industry of comparative advantage. However, RCA couldn't explain what the foundation of advantage is, despite well being used to show the comparative competitiveness status of different industries. In the contrary, the Factor Intensity Coefficient could be used to describe this foundation of factor endowment by comparing the real contents of different factors in imports and exports, but excluding the intension of advantage of the inspected industry based on factor endowment.Therefore, I adopt these two together, and make the mutual supplementation with each other, in order to find out more scientifically the foundation of comparative advantage in China's foreign trade.The result indicates that although China so far still mainly exports labor-intensive commodities and imports capital-intensive ones, the commodity structure of export and import has been changing obviously, the proportion in its total export of labor-intensive goods decreases and that of capital-intensive goods increases continuously.