A Study On Technology Progress And The Improvement Of Service Export Structure

The world’s economy began to focus on service industry from1960s. Because the prosperity of service industry promoted the world’s trade in services, the trade of services has been the one of the most important ways of world’s economic activities after the goods trade and FDI. Under this background, this paper deeply analyzed the ways how the technology improvement affected the export structure of service of China by studying the details of the service industry of China.Firstly, this paper discussed the applicability of the trade theory in the domain of trade in services and reviewed the literatures about the factors which affect the export structure of trade of services, especially the factor of technology improvement. Secondly it investigated the status of the development of China’s trade in services, and focused on analyzing the situation of export in services of China and compared it with the developed countries. Thirdly, base on the theory of static comparative advantage, this paper constructed two dynamic models about the ways that technology improvement affected the export structure of trade in services, and specifically discussed how technology improvement affected the export structure of trade in services. At last, it empirically analyzed the mechanisms and contributions of the effects of technological imitation and spillover on China’s export structure of trade in services, and make suggestions for the policy-makers.This paper found China’s service industry and trade in services developed rapidly, and China has become the big country of trade in services from total amount, but not been the strong country from the structure, so which need to be improved. According to the static comparative advantage model, it proved technology improvement was the dominant factor of export of services. But according to the dynamic comparative advantage model, the effect of "learning by doing" can just solidify the export structure of services, so the developing country would fall into the "comparative advantage" trap, while the effect of spillover made the developing countries get the advanced technologies from the developed countries and allow to achieve technological catch-up. In real, because of the differences of the catch-up among the lagging countries, the efficiency of technological imitation was also a crucial factor.The empirical analysis found that both technological imitation and spillover enhanced the export structure of services of China, and the effect of imitation would be more significant than spillover in a long run. That is the promotion in human capital will play a more important role than FDI in improving the export structure of service of China.The last part of this paper suggested China should base on dynamic comparative advantage theory to constantly optimize the export structure of services by promoting human capital, increasing the efforts on attracting investment and R&D.