An Empirical Study On The Influential Factors Of International Naval Ship Export Trade

Shipbuilding industry constitutes a significant part of the overall national defenseindustry, providing military forces backing for coastal countries to maintain coastal safetyand secure maritime rights and interests. Through naval ship import, countries laggingbehind or relatively lacking in naval ship industrial capabilities may modernize their navalarmaments and accelerate the development of shipbuilding industry. Through naval shipexport, countries that are advanced in naval ship industrial capabilities can achieve somepolitical, economic and military benefits. Coincidence of two sides’ demands drives theformation of naval ship trade and the international naval ship market. Nevertheless, eversince the end of the cold war, especially in this post-financial crisis era, profound changeshave been brought to the international naval ship market, amongst which economic factorrises up. Despite export promoting measures having been introduced, exporters’ preferenceto political and military benefits makes it hard to adapt to new development trends ininternational market. Therefore, it’s applicably valuable to study the key factors that affectnaval ship export and their effects in line with the characteristics of international naval shipmarket, which will help exporters to improve market share, consolidate market position andmaintain and promote domestic shipbuilding industry.The purpose of this thesis is just to explore the various factors’ influencing mechanismon naval ship export and to verify the proposed theoretical model by way of empiricalanalysis. On this basis, importers’ and exporter’s countermeasures are analyzed and ways topromote China’s naval ship export are discussed.On the basis of analyzing factor endowment theory, technological gap theory, nationalcompetitive advantage theory, factors influencing military products’ supply and demand aswell as motives and effects of military product trade, this thesis sums up the constitutionaldimensions of naval ship export trade, containing export target, export composition, exportpattern and export scale and extracts four key influential factors including capabilityendowment, political preference, economic preference and military preference by analyzingthe influencing factors of naval ship export trade. Accordingly, a naval ship export model isbuilt; theoretical hypotheses reflecting factors’ influence on naval ship export are putforward and the indicator system is established. Next, this study collects relevant datathrough expert questionnaire and uses SPSS19.0and SmartPLS2.0for processing and analyzing in order to validate the hypotheses and modify the model. PLS-SEM analysisreaches the following conclusions: political and military preferences have significantlynegative effects on export target; economic preference and military preference respectivelyhave positive and negative effects on export composition; economic preference and politicalpreference respectively have positive and negative effects on export pattern; capabilityendowment, economic and military preferences, and export composition all havesignificantly positive effects on export scale. According to the empirical results, this thesisfinally analyzes the exporters’ countermeasures in line with market development trendsfrom several aspects of promoting their capability endowment, adjusting their preferencecombination, improving export composition and transforming export pattern, brieflyexplains how importers should seize the opportunity so as to raise shipbuilding industrialcapability and puts forward some suggestions boosting China’s naval ship export fordecision makers’ reference in our national defense industry.