Research On The Revolution And Influential Factors Of China’s Export Technology Sophistication Of Services

With the fast development of science and information technology as well as the assignment and improvement of service trade agreements and rules since 80-90 s last century,the tradeability of services increases remarkably,which results in the rapid development of service GVCs.International production fragmentation extended from manufacture industry to service industry changes the labor division and trade patterns of service industry,which makes it possible for developing countries to engage in the service international division of labor system,so that to obtain the benefits of specialization through their advantaged factors.This paper,considering the background of GVCs and international division of labor,employing the newest method of measuring the export technology sophistication of services(in short of ES),combining the 1995-2011 data from WIOD Database,calculates China’s overall ES and sub-sector ES from the perspective of domestic value added of export,so as to conduct a comparison between countries,and finds that although China’s overall ES increased rapidly during the sample period,it also legs behind the developed countries represented by G7,even India.But seen from the relative ES,a good change is that China’s backward degree is narrowing gradually.Besides,we can find the reason why China’s overall ES legs behind G7 and India is that China’s severe disadvantage in the ES in knowledge-intensive service sector.Unfortunately,this kind of disadvantage not only has no obvious evidence to become better,but also has become much more worse.Besides,the advantage of ES in labor-intensive sector has the signs of weakening,and in capital-intensive sector,China’s advantage is forming gradually.In general,seen from ES reflecting its international specialization status,China’s service industry has made some obvious progress when integrated into the trend of service GVCs.However,it still depends more on labor and capital intensive services,namely middle and low end services,or the low end stages of high end services,when participating in the service GVCs.And this denotes that China’s international specialization status in service industry is still low,and the international competitiveness of China’s service industry is in urgent need of being improved.Finally,further studies find that economic development level,R&D expenditure,human resources,the opening degree of service industry,FDI,institution quality and import technology sophistication of services all have an obvious effect onthe increase of the overall ES of a country,of which R&D expenditure’s effect is the most.Therefor,our country could concentrate its efforts on the above factors,in order to improve the overall ES and realize the upgrading development of China’s service industry,so that we can seek a favorable position in the trend of service GVCs as well as international division of labor.