Research On Changes And Optimization Of China’s Export Commodity Structure

Since the reform and opening up,as a big country having one-fifth of the world’spopulation China attracts investment from all over the world, based on the continuousopenness. Driven by the rapid development of a variety of factors both at home and abroad,the economy of China’s has become second largest economy in the world. In the field offoreign trade,China has made remarkable achievements and has become the first export tradecountry in the world. However, the rise of total trade volume does not mean t a very highlevel of trade quality.In2008affected by the global financial crisis, China’s merchandiseexports suffered a great shock. The major reason is their rationality of China’s exportsstructure. As the biggest exporter, optimizing and adjusting its export structure, China cannotonly stabilize the export scale and improve trade interests, but also promote the upgrading ofdomestic industries and transformation of economic development mode. Therefore, it is ofsignificant importance to study the changes and optimization of China’s export commoditystructure.Based on exports data of1984-2012, the paper studies the changes and optimization ofChina’s export commodity structure. On the changes in the structure of export commodities,the paper analyzed from four aspects: changes in the proportion of export primary productsand manufactured goods;internal structure movements of export manufactured commodities;movements in major export commodities; changes in the product mix of China’s exports tomajor trading partners. The results show a great change in China’s export commoditystructure from1984to2012:the rising proportion of manufactured goods; increasing exportsof capital and technology-intensive products.The major exports of China to U.S. arechanging from petroleum products, clothing products gradually to office machines,telecommunications, sound recording equipment and machinery products.There have beenno great changes in the exports to EU since1999.The exports of clothing commodities havea very important position in trade with Japan. On optimizing the export commodity structure,exports trade competitiveness index and revealed comparative advantage index are employedto evaluate the extent optimization of China’s export commodity structure. The resultsindicate that China keeps optimizing the structure of its export commodities and competitiveadvantage of mechanical and electrical products keeps improving, but the competitiveadvantage is not very strong. In addition,the main factors affecting the optimization ofChina’s export commodity structure are analyzed from both the theoretical and empiricalaspects.The results state that foreign direct investment, domestic industrial structure andhuman capital have significant impacts on the optimization of export commodity structure.The impact of R&D is not significant. The effective ways to achieve theoptimization of China’s export commodity structure are accelerating the optimization andupgrading of industrial structure, focusing on improving the quality of workers, encouragingtechnological innovation, using foreign investment rationally and marketization foreignexchange rate.