Research On Global Vertical Trade Structure And China's Trade Status:A Value-added Perspective

At present,the international vertical specialization has become a significant feature of economic globalization.Global production sharing links the countries and regions over the world,formed a huge international division of labor system.Vertical specialization promotes further prosperity of the international trade,also brings new changes for global trade and economy.With the development of the vertical specialization,the world's production and trade structures are changing,the patterns and status of participating countries have also changed.Meanwhile,the vertical specialized production contains a large number of double counts,intermediate inputs cross borders multiple times.As a result,traditional trade statistics become increasingly less reliable as a gauge of the international trade status,thus we must adopt new method to re-evaluate the current trade structure and countries' trade status.In light of such background,this paper studies the global vertical specialization from the perspective of value-added.Based on the ICIO database and modified vertical specialization indicators,this paper thoroughly analyzes the structure of global vertical trade from 1995 to 2011.Research shows,since 1995,with deepening of vertical specialization,global vertical trade also increase remarkably.Developed countries still dominate the global trade,while the importance of the developing countries is rising gradually.From the point of regional structure,European Union,North America and East Asia region has always been the main force.But the importance of the EU and NA area drops while the Middle East,Latin America have gradually played a more important role,which indicates that the vertical trade is still globalizing.From the perspective of nationality,the degree of participation in vertical trade varies.The EU and EA countries have higher participation rate.But in the rank of growth rate,top countries come from other areas,showing that countries out of these areas are joining the vertical trade with faster speed.Studies on the dynamic structure of vertical trade find that the participation mode is changing during the study period.Under vertical specialization,forward specialization is more advantageous to promote production,so regions have the tendency to choose to participate in the vertical trade with forward specialization.Research shows the development of forward specialization exceeds the backward specialization,DVR ratio increases faster than FVA ratio.Meanwhile,as the raw material supplier,the Middle East,Latin America and other regions have more advantages in the forward specialization,it has become a characteristic pattern of these regions.On the other hand,global vertical trade has become increasingly global fragmentation which progressed faster than regional fragmentation.Further study of the globalization trend found countries outside the traditional three major trade blocs are more and more integrated into global value chains and these countries primarily participate the global trade through forward vertical specialization.On this basis,using modified GVC status and international competitiveness indicators,this paper further studies China's real trade status.The research finds that gross trade statistics results have a huge difference from the value-added statistics,the variation rate is more than 30%,gross statistical results will produce large deviation.China has become the most important "transit station" of value-added,whereas the status as the value-added provider remains low.Research on the status of China's manufacturing industry indicates that during the integration into vertical trade,the position of labor-intensive industries raised,while the status of capital and technology-intensive industries experienced remarkable decline,including computer,electronic and optical equipment industry.Research on international competitiveness of the industry suggests that China's labor-intensive industries have been revealed comparative advantage,technology-intensive industry's RCA has experienced significant growth,while capital-intensive industry has been in a relatively revealed comparative disadvantage status.In general,our country still remains in low position of the vertical specialization division of labor,the international competitiveness although experienced growth,but still needs to be promoted further.