China’s Foreign Trade Comparative Advantage And Export Commodity Structures

The transformation and upgrading of foreign trade and the optimization of foreign trade structures are now hot topics in field of international trade research. China’s foreign trade has obtained great achievements since the reform and open policy. At the same time, there still exist many contradictions and problems in the export commodity structures, which are restrictions to the adjustment of China’s industrial structures. In order to make the development of China’s foreign trade transform from scale expansion to quality and efficiency, it’s necessary to study China’s export commodity structures and the influencing factors.As the cornerstone of modern international trade theory, the theory of comparative advantage is helpful in interpreting the formation of a country’s trade and industry structures. This paper will choose the manufacture industries as the research subject, which are classified under our country’s industry classification method, and then use the empirical analytical method to study the comparative advantages of manufacturing industries which have different factor intensities. Also, this paper will discuss how factor inputs different will affect the adjustment of export commodity structures, in order to offer beneficial references to China’s transformation and upgrading of foreign trade. The paper includes the following chapters:Chapter one is the introduction, which introduces the background and purpose of the research, the framework of the paper, and then points out the existing innovations and deficiencies.Chapter two is the summarization of domestic and international research literature. This part reviews the development of international trade theories, and summarizes the research results of both domestic and international theses. The introduction lays foundation for the following theoretical and empirical researchChapter three firstly shows the development of China’s foreign trade, and then takes the manufacturing industries which are classified according to different factor intensities as example, using the trade competition index to analyze the comparative advantages of different industries, thus describing China’s export commodity structures comprehensively.Chapter four is based on the HOV model. We will analyze the factors which affect China’s export commodity structures from the perspective of factor inputs. By constructing a panel data model which uses the export commodity structures of China’s manufacturing industries as explained variables, using the stationary test and regressing the model, we can analyze how different factor inputs influence the adjustments of export commodity structures. Also, we can figure out the mechanism these factors take to affect the export commodity structures.Chapter five is the conclusion and policy suggestions of this thesis. Finally, we believe that China’s export commodity structures still need to be adjusted using different methods. The abundant labor resources, the increasing capital, the technology inputs and the scale economy of an industry will prompt the adjustment of China’s export commodity structures by firstly upgrading the export industry structures. At last, this paper puts forward some suggestions to prompt the transformation and upgrading of foreign trade structures.