Analysis Of International Specialization Status And The Competitiveness Of China’s Aquatic Product Processing Industry In Global Value Chain

With the continuous integration of international economy and increasing internationalization of division pattern, the international specialization of traditional industry, which is based on product, is gradually deepening into the same product’s different processes, section or part of international intra-product specialization. Thus, more and more value creation and realization process of products are divided into different countries (regions), and the Global Value Chains (GVC) which bridges the world participating countries (regions) together is formed. Global Value Chains (GVC) has a significant impact on the industrial system construction and international competitiveness of all the participating countries (regions).Aquatic product processing industry is one of the three pillars of the aquaculture. Its global value chain covers the supply of raw materials based on farming or fishing, primary aquatic products, transportation of refrigeration and frozen primary products, deep and profound high value-added products, brand and sales, and the demand of consumers. Therefore, the international specialization status and the competitiveness of a country’s aquatic product processing industry in Global Value Chain has a significant impact on its structure optimization of the entire fishery industry, value creation and acceleration of fishery economy and even the whole country’s economy. China has a superpower of fishery in the world. It has abundant aquatic products, numerous aquatic products processing enterprises and a long history of aquatic product processing industry. Since the reform and opening up, China’s aquatic product processing industry has developed rapidly, and now it has various kinds of aquatic processing products, such as refrigeration and frozen products, seasoned and recreational products, minced fish products, sea health products, dried products and so on. However, the rapid development of aquatic products processing industry is also faced with problems, like emphasizing the production but ignoring quality, low technical content in products, products’quality and safety, anti-dumping and technical trade barriers, and so on. These problems restrict and affect the improvement of GVC specialization status and international competitiveness of aquatic product processing industry. Hence, from the new perspective of GVC specialization, studying the development of China’s aquatic product processing industry since 2002, and its international competitiveness from two aspects of the comparative advantage and competitive advantage analysis, has a strong practical significance and a certain innovation.First of all, this paper elaborates the research background and significance of choosing China’s aquatic products processing industry in the introduction part, combing domestic and foreign research review of GVC specialization and competitiveness of aquatic products processing industry, so as to relative study of China’s aquatic products processing industry for reference. Then, illustrating the research content and method, innovation points and research scope definition of the thesis. Secondly, this paper discusses the global value chain theory, comparative advantage theory and competitive theory, which are a basis theory of this paper. Then, analyzing the present development situation of aquatic products processing industry in China, and discussing its main existing problems from four aspects of total characteristics, structural characteristics, regional distribution characteristics, competitive characteristics. Furthermore, this paper illustrates the connotation and interest’s distribution of GVC specialization, choosing three indicators to have an empirical analysis of specialization status of China’s aquatic product processing industry in GVC since 2002. The result suggests that China’s aquatic product processing industry is still in the low-end of GVC, but its specialization status have a rising trend since the financial crisis in 2008.Finally, this paper analyses the competitiveness of China’s aquatic product processing industry from two aspects. On one hand, it uses comparative advantage theory to have a quantitative analysis of comparative advantage of aquatic products processing industry in China since 2002; on the other hand, it uses the value chain theory and competitive advantage theory to have a qualitative analysis of competitive advantage of China’s aquatic products processing industry. Then, it puts forward countermeasures and suggestions of strengthening competitiveness of China’s aquatic products processing industry from the macroscopic, medium and microcosmic three levels.