Study On Sino-EU Service Intra-industry Trade And The Influential Factors

Facing the global industrial restructuring trends, the development of the service industry has become the main impetus of modern economic growth. As the service sector gradually becomes the global industrial gravity center, service trade grows rapidly and strongly with its continuously upgrading international status. Since the Second World War, intra-industry trade which firstly appeared between developed countries has caught great attention. Nowadays, intra-industry trade becomes the mainstream of international trade among industrialized countries and is becoming the indispensable part of developing countries’foreign trade. As one of the largest emerging economies, China should not only larger its inter-industry trade but also actively develop its intra-industry trade in order to gain the dynamic advantage of international trade. So far most studies of intra-industry trade focus on manufacturing industry. There is no research about intra-industry trade of the service sector between China and European Union(EU). Based on the Sino-EU service trade, this paper analyzes the service intra-industry trade between these two economies which is of important theoretical and practical significance.Based on the literature review of foreign and domestic studies, this paper firstly analyzes the generative mechanism and influential factors of service intra-industry trade. The empirical analysis consists of three parts—status analysis, index measuring and regression test. According to the statistics, there exists imbalance between import and export department and among different service sectors, despite of the recent rapid development of bilateral service trade between China and EU. This paper takes an advantage of the relevant Sino-EU statistical data of service trade from 2003 to 2009 in the United Nations Service Trade Statistics Database, and calculates both the Sino-EU G-L and MIIT intra-industry trade indexes of the general service industry and sub-industries to help analyze both the level and growth pattern of Sino-EU service intra-industry trade. The regression test of influential factors of service intra-industry trade consists of the following two parts. Based on the panel data of service trade between China and EU15 from 2002 to 2008, we choose scale of nation, gap in per capital income levels, gap in opening degree of service industry, intensity of trade in goods, human capital and foreign direct investment as explanatory variables to establish multiple regression model and study on the factors that influence the development of Sino-EU service intra-industry trade. On the sub-industry level, we choose a typical sector—the transport sector to give further analysis. Using the cross section data of transport service trade between China and 21 EU countries in 2007, we conduct an empirical test about the influences of intensity of trade in goods, opening degree of transport sector, quality of transport-related infrastructure, human capital and gap in R&D upon transport service intra-industry trade. Based on the above theoretic and empirical analysis, we provide suggestions for improving Sino-EU intra-industry trade in services and enhancing the competitiveness of China’s service industry.