Decomposition and International Comparison of China's Import and Export Trade: From the Perspective of Global Value Chain

After joining the WTO, China is becoming more and more important in the world economy. Based on inter-country input-output tables, the paper recalculated the trade balance between China and other countries and regions through global value chain (GVC). The paper decomposes China's import and export trade and comparatively analyzes the degree of involvement of other countries in GVC. The results show: under the new calculation method, the trade surplus between China and other countries such as USA is not as large as what the traditional trade statistics shows, which was overestimated by 25% on average. Through the international comparison, it is found that China's GVC participation rates in 1995-2009 show a rising trend year by year, while countries such as USA and Japan are on the decline.