| The competitive level of manufacturing, a main entity of a country's economy, determines the comprehensive national strength to a large extent. With the accelerating global co-production process and rapid flow of production factors across the globe, international specialization has been furthered from “inter-product” to “within product” and new international division of labor in manufacturing is remarkably manifested based on the comparative advantages that each country only focuses on production of value-added chain. By this way, every tache of the production and final product consumption can be achieved through international trade. This makes the traditional division of labor based on statistical data of trade flow increasingly deviated from the practice of reality in terms of measuring a country(region) competitiveness. Against this background, it becomes important as for how to accurately measure the overall situation of the manufacturing sector and factors affecting international competitiveness and also significant to propose corresponding policies and recommendations to enhance the competitiveness. Thus, international competitiveness of China's manufacturing and influence factor are analyzed by comparing value-added trade and traditional trade statistics.Traditional trade statistics only considers the final product value dismissing the value of imported intermediate goods in the total value of the export goods when measuring international competitiveness index. This makes the measure and comparison result not reliable. Consequently, to reflect the value created by each country from the perspective of product value chain, the concept of value-added trade comes into existence and becomes emphasized in the academic circle. On the basis of existing literature and theory, data is adopted from TiVA(Trade in Value added) issued by WTO and OECD in May, 2013 to calculate TC and CA indexes of China overall manufacturing situation and that of each department. Also, the data can be utilized for comparing international competitiveness and competitiveness within the manufacturing industry. Differences between traditional trade data and the new method as well as the policy implication can be explored. Finally, empirical analysis can be conducted using international competitiveness factors of China's manufacturing. The thesis makes use of the panel data of value-added trade for China's overall manufacturing and each department from 1995 to 2011. Indexes such as CA index, labor cost, FDI, R & D investment, industrial scale, yearly average exchange rate are employed to measure manufacturing level. Meanwhile, main component and liner regression analysis are made.After comparison, it shows: first, the two methods demonstrate that labor intensive manufacturing has sort of competitiveness followed by capital intensive manufacturing. Second, challenges are that labor intensive manufacturing advantage is decreasing due to increasing labor cost and insufficient input for technology intensive manufacturing. Third, emphasis should be put on that China is still at the end of smiling curve without much value created by its own mainly because China's overall manufacturing level and competitiveness calculated by traditional statistics are higher than that measured by value-added trade statistics and the total manufacturing export amount is stubbornly high. The result of empirical analysis demonstrates: competitiveness of China's overall manufacturing situation mainly depends on R & D and foreign investments while the expansion of the industrial scale exerts less influence on it. In the last part of the article, suggestions are put forward to change the current industrial situation of being large but weak and to improve China's international manufacturing competitiveness. |
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