International Outsourcing Of China's Export Structure Analysis

International outsourcing refers to a phenomenon that enterprises transfer their non-essential business to foreign countries for the purpose of using foreign resources.International outsourcing is an inter-product vertical work division. Comparative advantage, factor endowment and scale economy all can be the driving force of international outsourcing.This paper analyses the outsourcing status of various industries of China by using the outsourcing index, and find that with the labor-intensive working procedure of the capital-intensive products transferring from the developed countries to the developing countries, capital-intensive industries in China accept more offshore outsourcing work than labor-intensive industries. Share of export for capital-intensive products in total exports was increasing steadily during 1997-2002, and the status of export for labor-intensive or resource-intensive products was just the reverse. We also find that outsourcing has been responsible for a growing part of China's trade surplus, and surplus caused by outsourcing was 1.5 times as much as that caused by the total trade during 1997-2002.By using the panel data, we set up a model to make empirical analysis on the influential factors of outsourcing. The results proved that comparative advantage and scale economy are the main bases of outsourcing, and labor intensity and work efficiency of an industry also have impacts on outsourcing. We find outsourcing has positive effects on raising the competitiveness of China's capital or technology intensive industries. China should encourage local enterprises to accept more offshore outsourcing and enlarge the comparative advantages and scale economy. China also should make the most of the advanced technologies and the overflow effects brought by outsourcing to promote the optimizing and upgrading of the industry structure.