A Study On China’s Import Structure

After economic reform, China’s foreign trade continues to expand. With accession to WTO, more opportunities for fair competition are provided to more domestic enterprises and then China’s foreign trade has been experiencing a rapid development. In2011, China’s total trade volume ranked the second and export volume attained the first place. China has been a trading power. However trading power is not equal to the trade power and the problems originated from China’s foreign trade cannot but arouse our attention. In a long term, we have been conducting the export-oriented foreign trade policy, which has contributed a lot to our trade and economic development. What’s worse to mention is that China’s export products are mainly processed products and we cannot achieve our economic goal only by exporting processed products. What’s more, there are more and more trade friction caused by being not balanced in export and import. In addition, to change unfavorable situation, there is need to study our import. Many literatures show that import can promote economic development, and can bring technology spillover effect. What’s more, an increase in import can ease trade friction to some extent. There are many issues involved in import, such as import management system, import policy and regime, import and economic development, import structure and so on. There are many documents about import, but not many about import structure. In view of this, it is necessary to study China’s import structure. Given that trade in services are not greater than trade in goods and statistical data of trade in services is not easy to get, so in this thesis, import structure of trade in goods is the topic.Part one of this thesis is the introduction which describes the background, significance of the selected topic, the idea of writing and innovation&shortcoming. Part two mainly reviews the literatures of import which is divided into two parts, literatures of relationship between import and economic development and literatures of import structure. Part three and Part four are cores of this thesis. Part three analyzes the character of China’s import structure which is divided into two aspects: size of imports and import structure. Size of imports is described from two aspects: significance of import in China and China’s import status in the world. Import structure is described from imported goods type, the origin of imported goods, import patterns and domestic import situation. Based on Part three, Part four mainly describes the problems of China’s import structure:imbalance of imported commodities, concentrated distribution of the origin, processing trade dominated by foreign-funded enterprises, imbalance of import and export in China and imperfect import policies. Part five provides countermeasures and suggestions on problems mentioned in part four:adjust the structure of imported goods, promote the import market diversification, improve import patterns, nurture imports market players, balance import and export in domestic and perfect the import policy. Part six is a summary of the main content of the thesis.