Research On China's Trade Structure Re-measure And The Influence Factors Of The Trade Structure Upgrading

With the development of productivity and division of labor, current pattern of trade evolutes from the Inter-industry trade, Intra-industry trade to the Intra-product specialization. this paper adopts two indicators of trade structure: sophistication and vertical specialization. Based on the new indicators, the paper take advantage of China's trade data in recent years to re-measure our country's trade structure.The empirical analysis will indicate the influencing factor in the technological upgrading of China's trade structure.First of all, this article introduces the traditional trade structure analysis method based on the summarize of the development in the international trade theory and the international trade mode.we point out the disadvantage of this kind of method,it only pay attention to the total amount of trade,but didn't estimate the additional value in the producing process. Under the realiaty of current division of labor, to evalue a country's trade structure should concern about the transition from the total volume of trade to the quality of the structure. In this paper, we study the Chinese trade quality structure from two main lines: one is the technical upgrading of the trade structure; another is the national trade interests based on the actual value-added in the products. In this two main lines, we introduce two types of indicators under the Intra-product specialization theory to calculate a country's trade structure: the sophistication indicators and the vertical specialization indicators. The first indicators are mainly used to measure a country's technological structure,and the second indicators are mainly used to measure a country's trade value.Then, we use the world import and export data in the world SITC 2 of 3 yards classification and China's export data to the U.S in SITC 2 classification. we measure China's sophistication indicator in 34 industries during 2001-2006,and show the comparison with the United States , Britain, Japan, which represent the developed countries .We find China's sophistication are in the ascendant in textile and garment,shoes and hats manufacturing industries, furniture manufacturing industry, sports goods manufacturing industry, plastic products industry which are low value-added industry.China's technological structure remain relatively low in the position compared with developed countries; Then, China's 11 manufacturing industries'vertical specialization indicators show that in China the technical content in food manufacturing industry and electronic and communication equipment manufacturing industry are not largely different.This result shows that China's industrial structure is still around the low-end in the value chain.After, in the research of influencing factors to the sophistication and the vertical specialization ,on the basis of theoretical analysis, we selected for the Chinese industry data from 2001 to 2006 to make the panel analysis.we found that FDI's impact on the trade structure upgrading is not significant, Though the current period of R&D investment makes against industrial structure upgrading, but the lag data show very significant effects.This results verifies once again the failure of those arguments similar to the "market for technology strategy".In the long term, we still have to rely on independent innovation to promote the industrial structure of the country as a whole.Finally, the article gives the the basic recommendations about the transform of export growth pattern and trade structure upgrading: while we stick to maintain the total volume of trade,we have to keep the technical structure upgrading and the trade value-added upgrading as the future direction of the trade strategic adjustment; We also should focus on capital structure, in accordance with China's industries and enterprises of different skill levels and absorptive capacity, we should choose the foreign investment of right technology gap to achieve the industry's best technology spillover effects; We should advocate for independent innovation of the enterprises, and continue to implement the policy that those enterprises which carry out a more pro-active innovation strategy can be entitled to tax-return discout.That is to say, this policy can relief independent innovation costs and staff training costs etc from the corporate income tax.