Measurement Of Export Sophistication In Service Trade Of China And Related Influencing Factors

As an important part of international trade,service trade is playing an increasingly important role.Nowadays,the academic study of international trade in services is focusing on measuring international competitiveness of service trade and the factors which affect them.Along with the deep study,more and more scholars begin focusing on technological level of export in service.Obviously,compared with the “total amount” analysis,research on technological level of service trade is more meaningful.Because there is great disagreement of the researches in service trade,experts are still trying to make deeper analysis of the structure in service trade.Current existing research results are concentrated in trade in goods instead of trade in services.Because of this,this paper attempts to contribute in these areas.First,by reviewing results of previous studies,the writer specifically defines those related concepts of service trade,and summaries the indicators that are measuring the technological level of export in service.Then,on this basis,this paper selects export technical sophistication,which was designed by Hausmann,as the indicator to measure the technological level of export in service.Also,we make a comparison among China,developing countries and developed countries.We find that the technical sophistication of service trade exports in China is significantly behind the developed countries.In addition,each sub-sector’s technical sophistication of exports in services trade is low,but the good news is that all the indexes are on rise.Finally,the paper examines what factors can affect the technical sophistication of service trade exports by utilizing time series data covering period from 2000 to 2014.It is finding that the per capital GDP,the ratio of FDI,the openness of import and export,quality of regulations and infrastructure are positively related to the export technical sophistication in trade of service.Then the author proposes six main factors which empirically influence export technical sophistication of service trade exports in China.Based on the above empirical results,the paper proposes some policy recommendations.