Study On The Changes And Influencing Factors Of China’s Agricultural Products’ Comparative Advantages

Agricultural trade is an important part of China’s foreign trade. Since joining WTO, China’s agricultural trade has been facing both opportunities and challenges. The total agricultural trade volume increases rapidly, while the trade gap keeps growing. Since2001, agricultural products with comparative advantage, like horticultural produce, seafood, poultry meat.etc, have become the dominant products in export market gradually, which means the comparative advantages of processed agricultural products slowly come out. However, the overall comparative advantages of China’s agricultural products have showed a significant decline. Therefore, the study on the comparative advantages’ changes of China’s agricultural products and the analysis on its determinants and influencing factors will be of significance to the future development of China’s agricultural trade as well as its international competitiveness.Making use of comparative advantages theory, this paper firstly describes the status quo of China’s agricultural trade, and employs the RCA index and NRCA index, as well as statistical tools to do an empirical analysis on the reasons and trend of the comparative advantages’changes of China’s agricultural products during2002and2012on the basis of the review of relevant researches at home and abroad,. Secondly, after selecting the United States as a representative country among China’s agricultural trade partner countries, this paper does a comparative analysis between America’s and China’s agricultural products by using RRCA index,. Thirdly, using measure economics tools, this paper does an empirical test on the determining factors of China’s14major crops with the help of panel data, and makesa qualitative analysis on the impacts of the agricultural science and technology innovation, national agriculture policies, and market demand on the agricultural products’ comparative advantages. Finally, this paper proposes appropriate policy recommendations on the basis of the conclusions of this paper as well as the actual situation of China’s agricultural trade.This study suggests that, on the overall trade situation perspective, the proportion of China’s agricultural trade in its total trade volume declines gradually, and China’s agricultural trade patterns are consistent with China’s basic national resource endowments configuration which is showing some stability, but the comparative advantages of traditional labor-intensive and land-intensive agricultural products have shown a clear downward trend, while the comparative advantages of processed agricultural products are higher than the comparative advantages of labor-intensive and land-intensive agricultural products. From the perspective of structural effect analysis, the main reason for the decline of comparative advantages is the changes of China’s agricultural products’ export structure; while from the perspective of competition effect analysis, the main reason is the rising of China’s position in international export. In addition, national resource endowments is still the basic factor affecting trade pattern of agricultural products, and agricultural science and technology innovation, national agriculture policies, and market demand all have effects on the comparative advantages of China’s agricultural products.According to the research findings, we offer some suggestions to improve the status quo of China’s agricultural products trade and its comparative advantages, among which are, based on the WTO framework, to construct development strategies for China’s agricultural products’ comparative advantages, to accelerate agricultural technology innovation,to Improve agricultural yields and agricultural technology content, to expand the degree of opening, to Improve the level of China’s agricultural products’foreign trade, to optimize the agricultural industrial structure, and to develop the comparative advantage of processing agricultural products.