中国出口比较优势分析——基于不同贸易方式生产异质性的研究

Re-estimate Revealed Comparative Advantage Based on Value Added Exports and Trade Heterogeneity:An Analysis for China

在以增加值为贸易核算标准的全球价值链背景下,本文综合考虑了产业的国际分工和国内关联,利用出口增加值替代传统的出口总额对产业出口比较优势进行了更为准确的衡量和分析。结果显示,中国的竞争力优势部门仍然集中在纺织服装等劳动密集型部门,一些技术密集型产品的比较优势虽然有所上升,但上升力度却被传统的指数高估。进一步地,考虑到中国加工贸易比重高这一特色以及加工出口和一般出口之间的生产异质性,本文利用区分中国加工贸易的国际投入产出表测算发现,与不区分加工贸易的结果相比,中国劳动密集型产品的出口优势更加明显,技术密集型产品的出口优势则进一步减弱。

The concept of revealed comparative advantage(RCA),proposed by Balassa(1965),has proven useful in many research and policy applications.In standard applications,it is defined as the share of a sector in a country's total gross exports relative to the world average of the same sector in world exports.However,with the increasing international fragmentation of production and the evolution of global value chain revolution,the problem of double counting of certain value-added components in the official trade statistics suggests the traditional computation of RCA could be misleading since it ignores both domestic and international production sharing.In order to remove this distortion,some authors have proposed using domestic value added in exports to substitute for gross exports as domestic value added in a country's exports describes the characteristics of a country's production.In this paper,this new substitution is followed,and multi-regional input-output model which is rooted in Johnson and Noguera(2012)is applied to analyze Chinese competitiveness of export and give the contrast analysis with other countries using the World Input-Output Database.The results show that China's comparative advantage sectors are still concentrated in primary products sectors and labor-intensive sectors such as agriculture and textiles during the period of 1995-2011.Although the competitiveness of some technology-intensive sectors is increasing over the years,the traditional RCA o-verestimates the growth rate.Furthermore,it is pointed out that previous literatures ignore the prevalence of processing trade in China when computing the new RCA of Chinese sectors.In this study,the new RCA of Chinese industries is re-estimated using OECD world input-output tables which distinguish China's processing trade,by taking into account the trade heterogeneity in production technology.The results reveal that processing trade is quite a significant contributor to the RCA of China's technology-intensive manufactures while traditional labor-intensive manufacturing goods depended more on normal trade rather than processing trade.