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Chinese Foreign Trade*

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  12 February 2009

Extract

China's opening to the outside world was perhaps the most visible of its reforms of the 1980s. China's international trade volume grew dramatically, it attracted tens of billions of dollars of foreign direct investment and it became an active borrower in international financial markets. In contrast to the pre-reform era, foreign trade grew more rapidly than the domestic economy and in some regions of the country it appeared that it had become a powerful engine of growth, accelerating not only the speed of domestic development but the pace of structural and technical transformation as well.

Type
The Chinese Economy in the 1990s
Copyright
Copyright © The China Quarterly 1992

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References

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4. The two series also differ in other minor aspects.

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15. Copies of the concordance are available from the author. It should be noted that the SITC scheme includes category S9, commodities not elsewhere classified, which includes mostly export processing and assembly activities. They cannot be assigned to specific industries. Thus the analysis below does not include them.

16. The only one of the 63 categories of exports more capital intensive was electric power, also classified as a primary product.

17. The correlation coefficient is — 0.29. Regressing the capital/labour ratio in production on the changes in exports of all categories produces a negative coefficient that is statistically different from zero at the 5% level. This relationship would be even stronger if processed and assembled exports, which are highly labour-intensive, could be taken into account. By 1990 re-exports of processed and assembled imports rose to $10.453 billion. The absolute increase in these exports between 1985 and 1990 exceeded that of any of the two-digit export categories analysed.

18. The share of China's export expansion accounted for by these five categories of exports is calculated on the basis of the export data reported by the Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations and Trade. This is the appropriate basis for measurement since, as noted above, the disaggregated export data being analysed excluded processing and assembly activities.

19. Disaggregated analysis cannot be done for the whole period since detailed trade data of the Chinese Customs Administration for the years before 1982 have not been publicly released. For 1982–84 for all export categories the correlation between export performance and capital intensity in production is positive but very weak. The correlation coefficient is +0.08. The estimated coefficient on the capital/labour ratio in alinear regression on changes in exports is positive but not significant, even at the 10% level.

20. Similar findings – that China's trade specialization in the early 1980s was not based on comparative advantage but that by the late 1980s China was exploiting its comparative advantage more fully – have been reported by Xiaogang, Zhang and Warr, Peter G., “China's trade patterns and comparative advantage,” in China: Trade and Reform (Canberra: Australian National University National Center for Development Studies, 1991), pp. 4672.Google Scholar Their study is based on China's 1981 input-output table, which contains 14 sectors producing traded goods; estimates of relative Chinese domestic prices and world prices for these 14 sectors; and World Bank estimates of the shadow prices of primary factors. Compared to the present study the main advantage is that it takes into account the intermediate goods used in the production of exports. Its disadvantages are that it is based on far more aggregated trade data and that the World Bank estimates of shadow prices are “rough.”

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46. In the absence of other forms of protection, that provided to domestic producers of goods that compete with imports would have been reduced in many cases since the reforms of import pricing (i.e. shifting to pricing based on the world market) would have more than offset the effect of the higher domestic currency price of foreign exchange. However, in many sectors tariffs, quotas and other barriers still provide significant protection to Chinese impon competing industries.

47. Most published provincial trade data, including that for Guangdong, is compiled on the same principles as those used by the Ministry of Foreign Economic Relations and Trade. Thus in the analysis below where the growth of the province's exports is compared to the nation as a whole and where the province's exports are expressed as a share of national exports the calculations are based on the Ministry data in Table 1.

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56. Guangdong and Shanghai respectively paid 148.0 and 39.9 yuan per ton for state allocated coal and 252.0 and 210.0 yuan per ton for coal purchased on the market. Ibid. p. 30.

57. In the mid-1980s, foreign invested firms in Guangdong typically included standby power generation equipment in their plants. By the late 1980s local supplies of power were sufficiently reliable that such facilities were not usually included in new joint venture plants in South China.

58. Among other local sources were bonds specifically issued by Guangzhou municipality to finance electric power projects. Wallich, Christine I., “Recent developments in China's financial sector: financial instruments and markets,” in Dorn, James A. and Xi, Wang (eds.), Economic Reform in China: Problems and Prospects (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), pp. 140–41.Google Scholar

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67. Ibid. p. 5.

68. Ibid. p. 12.

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