Study On Chinese Manufacturing Competitiveness From The Perspective Of Trade In Value Added

Under the new international division of labor system, the resource optimization configuration around the world, worldwide cooperation between the countries (regions) is more and more closely and the global trade pattern is from trade in goods to trade in tasks. Traditional trade statistics method is limited to the region segmentation and the final product, but ignores the function of intermediate trade in the process of production. With the development of processing trade, intermediate products’trade scale continues to grow, so the traditional trade statistics method can’t reflect a country’s real trade scale and trade interests. Traditional trade statistics method not only leds to repeat statistics, but also will exaggerate the volume of trade of final assembly countries, which (such as China) obtain a small amount of processing fees, while on the other hand have a large amount of trade surplus. As a result the international community concerns over the mirage of "statistical", the reason of which is the inadaptability of the traditional trade statistics method. At the same time they pay more and more attention to the value creation and profit distribution of each link on the value chain, so the "trade in value added" statistics method has been gradually valued and recognized. This statistical method, adopting the technology of the input and output, is able to measure the real international trade condition and avoid the shortcomings of traditional trade statistics method by making statistics of domestic value-added.With the degree of integration into the global division of labor system deepening, China’s manufacturing exports grow rapidly, however exports include a large number of value created by other countries, which leads to less domestic value-added. In this case, using the traditional trade statistics to measure international competitiveness index will produce certain deviation. While based on the new "trade in value added" statistics method can objectively reflect the real earnings of countries in international trade, which is conducive to judge a country’s real competitiveness of export commodities. Therefore, how to correctly regard the export of China’s manufacturing industry scale and to reasonable review the status in the international division of China’s manufacturing industry and competitiveness is becoming the most important topic nowadays. From the perspective of "trade in value added’", this paper uses Stehrer (2012) model and WIOD database to estimate the China’s manufacturing industry import and export, then compares with the data calculated by the traditional trade statistics method, in order to review the trade scale of China’s manufacturing industry and clear the differences between the two statistical methods. In addition, on the basis of "trade in value added", this paper will build the global value chain of per capita income index and the revealed comparative advantage index, aiming to measure the status of China’s manufacturing industry in the new international division of labor and competitiveness level through the two index. In this paper, the structure of the arrangement and the main content is as follows:The first part is introduction, which mainly introduces selected topic background, research significance, the structure and the research methods, points out the innovations and shortcomings of this paper, defines the concept related to this study, and expounds the "trade in value added" statistics method with related research using such method, the connotation of the competitiveness of manufacturing and related research status as well. The second part focuses on the comparative study of’’trade in value added", including the calculation method of "trade in value added’", data sources and analysis results. The third part studies the status of China’s manufacturing industry in the new international division of labor. By measuring the global manufacturing value chain per capita income index, this part analyzes the position of China’s manufacturing industry in the international division of labor. The fourth part analyzes the international competitiveness of China’s manufacturing industry, reviews the manufacturing competitiveness level by measuring the revealed comparative advantage index based on the "trade in value added", and compares the competitiveness of manufacturing industry across countries and industries. The last part is the research conclusion and policy suggestions. The main conclusions are as follow:(1) The statistical illusion made by the traditional trade statistical methods has greatly exaggerated the total trade scale of China’s manufacturing industry, distorted trade export, which shows a rising tendency. Low technology manufacturing industry is still the "backbone" of China’s manufacturing industry.(2) Compared with other major countries in the global value chain, the added value of China’s manufacturing trade has been the first since 2006, but the global manufacturing value chain per capita income level is the lowest. Although the per capita income is growing faster than any other countries, the ability to benefit from the global value chain still needs to be improved. Similarly, the status of China’s manufacturing industry in international division of labor is increasing year by year but is still not high compared with other countries.(3) The revealed comparative advantage index of China’s manufacturing industry is greater than 1, shows a trend of increasing and has a certain competitive advantage, but only the international competitiveness of low technology manufacturing industry is in a top-level in the world. Only to climb to high level of the global value chain, can we further improve the international competitiveness of China’s manufacturing industry.