Research On The Impact Of ICT On The Competitiveness Of Service Trade

According to WTO’s statistics,between 2010 and 2016,the average annual growth rate of global trade of goods exports was 1%,while the average annual growth rate of exports of service trade was 4%.The proportion of total trade in services exports to total trade increased from 23.9% in 2003 to 31.1% in 2016.In recent years,China’s export of goods has slowed down,while the scale of trade deficit has been expanding.The service trade deficit in 2017 accounted for 34.45% of the total import and export of services.Series of digital reports of McKinsey pointed out that service industries such as information and communication,media,finance and insurance,and specialized services are digitally intensive industries.UNCTAD also proposed the concept of “Potentially ICT(Information and Communication technology)-enabled Services”,referring to the types of service that can be delivered through ICT networks.At the same time,countries or regions with high levels of ICT development tend to have higher service trade competitiveness.Therefore,this paper attempts to study the impact of ICT development level on service trade competitiveness through theoretical and empirical methods.First of all,this paper analyzes the impact of ICT on the competitiveness of a country’s service trade.As a high-quality driving factor,ICT can reduce the transaction costs of service trade by “de-intermediation”,“promoting information exchange” and “reducing opportunism” and promote innovation in a country’s service industry.At the same time,through a developed ICT network,a country can be embedded in the “international network service value chain”.Therefore,this paper proposes that ICT can enhance the competitiveness of a country’s service trade through transaction cost mechanism,innovation mechanism and embedded effect mechanism.Secondly,this paper compares the development level of ICT in different countries from four aspects: ICT infrastructure level,ICT usage level,ICT commercial application level and ICT affordability level.And the competitiveness of different countries and various service trades with TC index,RCA index and CA index,followed by A simple statistical analysis of the relationship between ICT and service trade competitiveness.Thirdly,this paper establishes a fixed effects model,using panel data of 41 countries from 2003 to 2016,and conducts full-sample regressions and subsample regressions for service trade and kind of service trade respectively,followed by a series of robust analysis to benchmark regression results.Finally,according to the results of the regression,the paper proposes corresponding policy recommendations about how developed countries and developing countries can improve competitiveness of the overall services trade and various of service trades by improving different aspects of ICT.Based on that,the paper put forwards corresponding policy recommendations according to specific conditions of China.