Empirical Study On The Export Sophistication Of China’s Textile Industry

Textile industry is China’s important and traditional pillar industry which is vital to national wellbeing and people’s livelihood. With the economic development fatigue in domestic and international market in recent years, export trade of textile industry attracts much more attention. Therefore, this paper, getting rid of simple quantitative index, uses quality index to study the development of textile industry.This paper builds export sophistication model, uses UN Comtrade database to find out the textile industry export data according to the classification of HS1992, and calculates the export sophistication for the major countries and regions of the world from1992to2012. Results shows, China’s export sophistication presents a typical "N" trends from$5193.11to$11344.75during the twenty years with its average growth rate per annum3.98%, and in comparison this index is still below the world’s average level. The export of textiles&apparels is of low quality and lacks high technology.In the empirical study of the main influence factors for the textile industry export sophistication, this paper introduces three variables to be tested, i.e. Per Capita GDP, Export Value and Export Price. Results shows, these variables all contribute to the promotion of the textile industry export sophistication, especially, Per Capita GDP contributes most with its elasticity coefficient0.41, then the Export Value with its elasticity coefficient0.061comes second and Export Price is the weakest with its elasticity coefficient0.058.In conclusion, this paper proposes that China should change its development idea, practice scientific development view, formulate reasonable and urgent policies, continually optimize the textile industrial structure and promote the textile industrial upgrading, only in that way, China can build a true powerful country for textile industry.