Research On The International Competitiveness Of China’s Rare Earth Product Export

In the current context of the green and low-carbon transformation of energy in order to achieve the goal of "carbon neutrality",Rare Earth Elements(REE)are widely used as raw materials in various fields due to their unique physical and chemical properties.China is the largest reserve country of rare earth resources in the world.In the past few decades,rare earth products have occupied a very important position in China’s foreign trade market.However,the existing research literature on the international competitiveness of China’s rare earth exports still has many deficiencies,especially the lack of in-depth research on the international competitiveness of China’s rare earth products from the perspective of industrial chain,technological innovation and national industrial capacity.This paper chooses the industrial chain and technological innovation as the research perspective,and the empirical part uses the decomposition results of the Constant-Market-Share Model(also known as CMS model)to analyze the dynamic trend of the international competitiveness of China’s rare earth export products.In addition,the comprehensive evaluation system of the national competitiveness of the rare earth industry is constructed by using the entropy method,and the indicative comparative advantage index(RCA index)is improved according to the comprehensive score of the entropy method,and then the optimized NRCA index is used to make a horizontal comparison between different countries on the international competitiveness level of China’s rare earth products.This paper mainly adopts the above two empirical methods.The international competitiveness of China’s rare earth products from 2008 to2019 is comprehensively evaluated from a dynamic perspective.The final research results show that:(1)China has a significant impact on the world rare earth market in four aspects: rare earth output,export scale,product structure and market structure;(2)During the whole research period,the international competitiveness of China’s rare earth exports began to rise after a sharp decline;(3)From the perspective of industrial chain segmentation,the results of CMS model show that the competitiveness of China’s upstream rare earth products in the international market has a downward trend,the competitiveness of the midstream products has an upward trend,and the competitiveness of the downstream products has a fluctuating trend,that is,the downstream products obviously lack competitiveness of China’s rare earth products in the specific market;(4)By constructing a comprehensive evaluation index of the international competitiveness level of the rare earth industry with technological innovation as the core,it can be found that resource endowment is still the most important factor affecting the international competitiveness level of the rare earth industry,but the calculation result that the weight of technological innovation is 21.67%proves that technological innovation is also extremely important to promote the highquality development of the rare earth industry;(5)From the different results before and after the introduction of NRCA index,we can see that the international competitiveness of rare earth products is not only related to the export scale,but also related to many non-economic factors of a country,which cannot be reflected by the traditional RCA index.