中国服务(旅游)贸易逆差扩大:是资本外逃还是经济再平衡?

China’s Widening Service Trade(Travel Item) Deficit:Capital Flight or Economic Rebalancing?

近年来,中国服务贸易尤其是旅游贸易逆差急剧扩大,引起了各界对于中国资本外逃问题的关注。本文利用银行代客跨境收付数据,规避了国际收支数据统计口径变化造成的影响,重新估算中国服务贸易数据,发现中国服务贸易进口量在2014-2016年并未出现异常增加的情形。同时,利用重新估算的服务贸易数据,发现中国2001 年以来人均GDP 与旅游进口占比服务贸易进口的关系,同亚洲新兴工业国家1997 年亚洲金融危机前的情形相一致,并且中国1982-2009 年和2010-2016 年人均GDP 对于旅游进口占比的影响系数大小相近,说明中国近几年并没出现偏离长期趋势的旅游进口异常增加。

In recent years, China’s trade deficit in services, especially in tourism, has expanded sharply, which has led to concerns about capital flight from China. By using the cross-border payment and receipt data of banks on behalf of their clients to avoid the impact of changing statistical caliber of balance of payments data, this article re-estimates China’s service trade scale and finds that the country’s import in services did not increase abnormally from 2014 to 2016. With the newly estimated value of China’s service trade, we find that the relationship between China’s per capita GDP and the portion of travel imports in service imports since 2001 is consistent with that of Asian emerging industrial countries before the 1997 Asian financial crisis. Also, the coefficients of influence of China’s per capita GDP on travel import ratio in 1982-2009 and 2010-2016 are at similar levels, indicating that China’s travel import growth in recent years has not deviated from its long-term trajectory.