Service Trade Supports China'S Foreign Trade

Under the complex and severe domestic and international situation, the downward pressure on China's foreign trade is increasing, and the growth of foreign trade has turned into a "slow lane", even the first negative growth after the global financial crisis. The low growth trend of China's foreign trade will become the "new normal" of China's foreign trade growth and will last for a long time. However, we should not decline China's foreign trade because of this, but fully realize that this is the only way for China's foreign trade to break away from the traditional extensive growth mode of "two high and one capital" and strive to cultivate and lead the new engine of trade growth. The key question is whether we can quickly cultivate new growth points of China's foreign trade and effectively support China's foreign trade.

Trade in services has also become an important area for countries to improve the status of international division of labor and a new growth point of trade. According to the statistics of the World Trade Organization (WTO), from 2008 to 2014, the export of world service trade increased from US $3.98 trillion to US $4.94 trillion, with an average annual growth of 3.7%, significantly higher than the 2.7% growth rate of goods trade in the same period.

In recent years, China's service industry has developed rapidly. In the first three quarters of 2015 alone, the added value of China's service industry further rose to 51.4%, 10.8 percentage points higher than that of the secondary industry. The amount of foreign capital absorbed by the service industry grew by 19.3%, accounting for 61% of China's total actually utilized foreign capital. In September, China's non manufacturing business activity index (PMI) was 53.4, much higher than the manufacturing purchasing managers' index of 49.8, indicating that China's service industry is developing well.

China has gradually entered the stage of economic development dominated by the service industry, which has laid a solid industrial foundation for the rapid development of service trade. According to statistics, in the first 11 months of 2015, the total import and export volume of China's service trade was 3.15 trillion yuan, an increase of 18% over the same period of the previous year. Among them, service exports reached 1.27 trillion yuan, up 16.1% year on year; Service imports reached 2.44 trillion yuan, up 19.1% year on year. The rapid growth of service trade has made its share in foreign trade (the sum of imports and exports of goods and services) continue to rise, from 10.3% in 2011 to 14.4% in November 2015, the optimization of China's foreign trade structure. While the service trade grew rapidly, the service trade structure also continued to optimize. Among them, the rapid growth of the export of high value-added services such as computer services, advertising services, cultural and entertainment services has played an important role in promoting the structural adjustment and optimization of trade in services. In the first 11 months of 2015, the export volume of computers and information services was 134.27 billion yuan, up 33% year on year; Insurance and other business services also increased by 25.5% and 224% respectively. The rapid growth of emerging service industry exports has improved the added value of China's service trade exports, promoted the development of knowledge intensive enterprises, and made positive contributions to the upgrading of domestic industrial structure.

When the trade in goods encounters extremely cold weather, the trade in services is booming, just like a wisp of warm sunshine in the cold winter, supporting China's foreign trade. However, compared with international trade in services, China's trade in services still has a large gap, and there is still a long way to go. Globally, service trade accounts for about 20% of goods trade. In 2014, the service trade of the United States, Germany and Japan accounted for 28.3%, 21.8% and 23% of the trade in goods respectively, while that of China was only 14%.

Even compared with India, which is also a BRICS country, China still has a big gap in service trade. India is one of the countries with the highest proportion of service trade in goods trade, which was 35.4% in 2014. From the perspective of the development structure of international service trade, the proportion of traditional service industries such as tourism, transportation and construction in service trade has gradually declined, and modern service industries with high technology and high added value such as communication, computer and information services, consulting, finance and insurance have developed rapidly, The proportion of exports of traditional services has declined year by year, but it is still mainly concentrated in traditional industries. In the first 11 months of 2015, the export of traditional service industries such as transportation, tourism and construction still accounted for half of the total export of services, accounting for 49.2%. It can be seen that compared with the trade in goods, the international competitiveness of China's trade in services is still weak, and the space for future development is still large.

In order to promote the accelerated development of trade in services, the State Council issued the Several Opinions on Accelerating the Development of Trade in Services at the beginning of 2015, which aims to expand the scale of trade in services, optimize the structure of trade in services, innovate the development model of trade in services, cultivate market players in trade in services Further expanding the opening up of the service industry and vigorously promoting foreign investment in the service industry are the main tasks to accelerate the development of service trade. Since then, the Ministry of Finance and Industry of the People's Republic of China has also published the cross-border e-commerce Guiding Opinions on Healthy and Rapid Development, proposed to encourage the development of various cross-border e-commerce service providers, improve the cross-border logistics system, and promote the construction of a single window comprehensive service system for cross-border e-commerce customs clearance, inspection and quarantine, foreign exchange settlement and other key links. In order to ensure the implementation of the above policies, in August 2015, the State Council established an inter ministerial joint meeting system for the development of trade in services, coordinated the import and export policies of various departments, coordinated the opening up of the service industry, promoted the facilitation and liberalization of trade in services, and further promoted cultural creativity, animation design, finance and insurance Development of service trade and service outsourcing in biomedicine and other fields.

In addition, in order to speed up the "inviting in" and "going out" of the service industry, China is actively signing service trade cooperation agreements with countries along the "Belt and Road", striving to carry out practical cooperation under the bilateral framework, and promoting the going out of service enterprises such as third-party consulting and certification, finance and insurance, logistics procurement, etc. From January to August 2015, Chinese enterprises and“ The Belt and Road Initiative ”The amount of service outsourcing contracts signed by countries along the line was 9.3 billion US dollars, up 27.9% year on year, significantly higher than the growth rate of service outsourcing to other countries and regions.

In order to further adapt to the new changes in the rules of international trade in services modeled on the TPP rules, China has carried out targeted pilot tests on the new rules in four free trade zones, including Shanghai, Guangdong, Tianjin and Fujian foreign investment Implement the management model of pre access national treatment plus negative list, and improve the quality and level of foreign capital utilization.

In order to basically realize the liberalization of service trade between the Mainland and Hong Kong and Macao, the Agreement on Service Trade between the Mainland and Hong Kong under the CEPA framework was signed with Hong Kong at the end of November 2015 and will be officially implemented on June 1, 2016. This is the first free trade agreement in the field of service trade to be fully opened across the mainland in the form of pre access national treatment plus a negative list, marking the basic realization of service trade liberalization across the mainland and Hong Kong. Under the agreement, 153 departments of the mainland are fully or partially open to Hong Kong's service industry, accounting for 95.6% of the total 160 service trade departments of the World Trade Organization, of which 62 departments apply national treatment to Hong Kong in terms of the service model of "commercial presence". The negative list of the "commercial presence" service model covers 134 service trade departments, and 120 restrictive measures inconsistent with national treatment are reserved. A positive list covering cross-border services, telecommunications and cultural services added 28 opening measures. In terms of investment facilitation, the approval of contract and articles of association of Hong Kong service providers for the establishment and change of companies in most service trade departments was changed to record management. The "agreement" has become a new milestone in the opening up of China's service industry, and will inevitably promote the rapid development of service trade between the mainland and Hong Kong.

In the above context, it is expected that In 2016, China's service trade will continue to grow rapidly, with a growth rate of more than 10%. The total volume of service imports and exports will exceed 4 trillion yuan, continuing to support China's foreign trade under the "new normal".