Empirical Research On The Emergy Of China’s Foreign Trade

Shifting of mode of China’s foreign trade development is one of the importantparts in China’s comprehensive reform and opening. China’s foreign trade hasmaintained a rapid growth in the past three decades, but urgent problems still exist inoptimization of trade structure. Traditional statistics of China’s foreign trade aremeasured by monetary terms. They ignored the ecological problems such as loss ofresources and environment pollution in the process of foreign trade, and failed toreflect real benefits or losses accurately. This thesis aims to analyze both theeconomic benefits and ecological benefits from foreign trade of China. Based on theemergy analysis theory and method, this thesis measures the China’s foreign tradedata by Emergy Approach, which can both include economic activities and ecologicalimpacts, and further analyzes the structure of China’s foreign trade from theperspective of sectors, trade partners and trade mode.China consumes a great many ecological resources in the process of production.The imports and exports emergy shows obvious periodic characteristics. The resultsof empirical analysis indicate that non-ignorable losses of ecological resources arehidden behind the significant economic benefits in China’s foreign trade. In terms offoreign trade in different sectors, trade in goods has continuous trade surplus but thelarge energy loss. However, trade in service suffers from trade deficit and emergysurplus. Furthermore, trade in heavy chemical industry has the same problems withservice trade. Meanwhile, trade in light industry has large trade surplus and increasingemergy surplus. In terms of different trade partners, this thesis takes Germany,Indonesia and Nigeria for examples. Trade deficit and emergy deficit occurred intrade between China and Germany. Trade balance between China and Indonesia shiftsfrom trade deficit and emergy deficit to trade surplus and emergy deficit. However,trade between China and Nigeria has both surplus in trade and emergy. In terms ofdifferent trade modes, China’s general trade shifts from both surplus of trade andemergy to deficits of trade and emergy. Processing trade has both surplus of trade andemergy, but it hasn’t been improved effectively in recent years.This thesis puts forward several strategies and recommendations, such as improving the efficiency of resource utilization, increasing the import of energyproducts, strengthening the ability of dealing with outer interferences and maintainingthe stability of economic and ecological development. Through these strategies andsuggestions, this thesis further supports that China needs to optimize the structure ofits foreign trade, gain both economic benefits and ecological benefits from foreigntrade simultaneously, and achieve the goal of the sustainable development ofeconomy and ecology.