The Cost of International Trade in Services: Regularity and Chinese Experience
Read
DownLoad |
| Title | The Cost of International Trade in Services: Regularity and Chinese Experience
|
| Author | Hu Zongbiao and Wang Shuli |
| Organization | School of Business Administration，Zhongnan University of Economics and Law；School of Economics，Wuhan University of Technology |
| Email | hzb1969@163.com；wangsl@whut.edu.cn |
| Key Words | Service Sectors; Trade Cost; Country Difference; Sector Difference; Substitution Elasticity |
| Abstract | This paper comprehensively investigates the change regularity and China’s reality of international trade costs in services, using a theory-based methodology with a more realistic assumption that bilateral trade costs are asymmetric, and the large sample data of world input-output table (861000 observations). The results show that: (1) Different from Miroudot et al. (2010), we find the cost of international trade in services is in downward trend which is consistent with the change path of goods trade costs, and falling speed of the former is lower than the latter; (2) Whether high-income or middle-income economies, international trade costs in services are higher than in goods sectors, and trade costs in consumer services are nearly two times larger than in producer services (falling speed of the former is lower than the latter); (3) Whether in services or goods, trade costs of high-income economies are lower than that of middle-income economies, and falling speed of the former is lower than the latter after entering the 21st century; (4) China’s reality is consistent with the world’s change regularity. Measuring trade costs in China’s services sub-sectors for the first time and the results show that trade costs in transport (water and air, etc.) and post and telecommunications sectors are relatively low, possible reason is that extensive application of information and communication technology improves the tradability, but still higher than in most of manufacturing sectors. |
| Serial Number | WP570 |
| Time | 2014-01-14 |
|