A Comparative Study Of Trade Competitiveness Between China And The Asean Nations

In recent years,China has carried forward the upgrading of ASEAN-China FTA to facilitate economic and trade cooperation.Moreover,Chinese government raised the strategy of "One belt and One Road" and ASEAN Countries are playing important roles in "One Road",which is the abbreviation of "The 21st Century Maritime Silk Road".From all these we find that ASEAN is more and more important to China.The research of international competitiveness is helpful to understand the present situation of bilateral trade between China and ASEAN.It is the basis to provide advices so as to upgrade bilateral trade cooperation and enhance the international competitiveness.As the international division of labor has changed,world economy takes on the feature of Global Value Chain(GVC).And the essence of international competitiveness has also changed.The total import and export data can’t reflect the real level of competitiveness.Therefore,this paper will embed China and ASEAN countries in global value chain and measure trade competitiveness with data of value-added trade.Then we will get some conclusion from comparison between China and ASEAN.This paper firstly sorts out the related research of competitiveness,global value chain and value-added trade.Then the article introduces the approach of decomposition of value.According to the result of decomposition,three indices for measuring international competitiveness is built.They are GVC income,GVC position,GVC participations and RCA_Value Added.This article then compares international competitiveness between China and ASEAN with three indexes,from different perspective such as nations,bilateral trade,industry,as well as bilateral industry.And we get some conclusion from analysis.From the aspect of GVC income,we know that gross export data overestimate the trade gains with 20-40 percent.China has a higher trade gain rate than ASEAN countries in bilateral exports.However,the trade gains for both China and ASEAN in the industry of computer,electronic optical equipment are very low,which means weak competitiveness.From the point of GVC position and GVC participation,we find that GVC participation of both China and ASEAN are high because backward participation rate grow faster.And the slow growth of the forward participation rate leads to lower GVC position.This means the ability of exporting high value products is not strong.Especially in the knowledge intensive industry,the exports contain too much foreign value which is a strong evidence of a weak international competitiveness.From the analysis of RCA index at industry level,it can be found that ASEAN countries have competitive advantage in primary products,resources products and services.China has stronger competitiveness in manufacturing industry.But both sides show high RCA VA indexes in some labor-intensive manufacturing industry,which means high similarity and thus a competitive relationship between the two.In the end of the paper,we put forward some suggestions to promote international competiveness and further trade cooperation according to the analysis above.This article provides a new angle to reveal the true level of competitiveness of both China and ASEAN by analyzing the international competitiveness from the perspective of GVC with value-added trade data instead of traditional export data,which is the research foundation and theoretical basis to come up with policy advices.