An Analysis Of China’s Service Trade Openness

Since China joined the WTO, it speeds up the process of opening service trade. Servicetrade plays a more and more vital role for a country’s economy, and the development ofservice trade gradually has become a new economic growth point. Service trade opening tothe world is a important move which cannot be underestimated when it comes to the wholedevelopment of trade in services. But, after joined the WTO for more10years, the progress ofthe opening of China’s service trade is unknown. In this paper, it introduces the situation andcharacteristics of the development of China’s service trade and analyzes the progress ofChina’s service trade liberalization. This paper use TIS index and service trade restrictivenessindex measure the level of service trade openness. This paper also uses Hoekman’s frequencyanalysis method to evaluate China’s service trade openness and analyzes the advantages anddisadvantages of frequency indexes based on the service schedule of specific commitments.The gravity model has been widely applied in the analysis of bilateral trade in goods; thispaper introduced the revised gravity model to carry out quantitative analysis which is on thebasis of related service trade data between China and its service trade partners. Finally, thispaper integrates four methods which calculate the service trade openness, analyzes thenecessity and ways of improving the service trade openness including quantitative analysis.This paper firstly quotes World Bank STRI index to measure China’s service tradeopenness level and compared with international measurement results. It is rarely seen indomestic research about reference of STRI data and the index is seldom used, the latest STRIdata used in this article are from World Bank. This paper also analyze China’s service tradeopenness about overall schedule and division schedule on the basis of specific commitmentsin GATS Annex9, from the two aspects of market access and national treatment respectively.In addition, this paper established the gravity model to estimate the service trade exportamount, and then compared with the actual volume of service trade export; builds a new indexabout potential volume of service trade to measure China’s service trade openness level. Theresearch on service mostly stayed in estimation of export of service trade; rarely establish newindex associated with the actual and estimated volume of service trade. At last, this paperanalyze the relationship between service trade openness and GDP growth based on thecalculation results about service trade openness level made before, and it is more scientificbecause it builds growth rate index to replace original data for regression estimation.