经贸英语精选(第二版)

研究生招生制度研究 - 学位认证

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Pre-reading Activities

Before reading the passage, try to answer the following questions.

1. Do you know anything about China’s exports?

2. What are the most popular products exported from China to the world?

What’s So Special about China’s Exports?1 The phenomenal performance of China constitutes the great economic miracle of the last quarter century. China’s economy has expanded by leaps and bounds, at historically unprecedented rates that few economists would have found plausible or feasible ex ante. More importantly, this growth has lifted hundreds of millions of people from poverty and has helped improve health, education, and other social standards. China has accomplished all this using its own brand of experimental gradualism — increasingly relying on markets and on price signals, yet until very recently doing so within the boundaries of a highly unorthodox set of institutions. That trade has played a significant role in this transformation is beyond dispute. China would likely have grown even if the global economy had been closed. And the very early stages of Chinese growth, based on rural reform, did not in any significant way rely on global markets. But from the mid-1980s on, one must suppose that China’s growth was fueled and sustained by the opportunities that the world market offered. We can see the increasing footprint of foreign trade and investment in all the major aggregates. The share of exports in GDP rose from virtually nothing in the

研究生招生制度研究 - 学位认证

2 经贸英语精选（第二版）

1960s to close to 30 percent in 2003, a rate of increase that is much larger than what has been experienced elsewhere in the world (see Figure 1). Inward direct foreign investment has risen from close to zero in the early 1980s to around 5 percent of GDP. The flip side of these figures is that China has become one of the world’s biggest trading powers, accounting for

6% of global trade flows (Figure 2).

Figure 1

Source: World Development Indicators Database

Figure 2

Source: World Development Indicators Database

The success with which China has integrated itself into the world economy raises many questions. Drawing the real lessons from this experience is important, not only because China is the stellar example which other developing countries are trying

研究生招生制度研究 - 学位认证

Unit 1 3 to emulate, but also because the shape of China’s own future policies depend (or should depend) on these lessons.

The task is not made easier by the highly unconventional manner in which China has achieved its global integration. The standard list of recommendations for countries pursuing this goal includes: dismantling quantitative restrictions on imports, reducing import tariffs and their dispersion, making the currency2 convertible for current account transactions, eliminating bureaucratic red tape and other impediments to direct foreign investment, improving customs procedures, and establishing the rule of law. Measured by these guidelines, China’s policies resemble more those of a country that messed up big time than those of a country that became a formidable competitive threat in world markets to rich and poor countries alike. In brief, China opened up very gradually, and significant reforms lagged behind growth (in exports and overall incomes) by at least a decade or more. While monopoly state trading was liberalized relatively early (starting in the late 1970s), what took its place was a complex and highly restrictive set of tariffs, non-tariff barriers, and licenses. These were not substantially relaxed until the early 1990s.

Table 1 shows the trend for import tariffs: In the early 1990s, tariffs still averaged above 40 percent, with significant dispersion and a maximum rate above 200%. While the home market was highly protected, the penalizing effect of these tariffs on export production was neutralized through duty drawbacks and other incentives for export oriented investment projects. Currency markets were not unified until 1994.

Table 1 China’s import tariffs

average average (st. dev) Source: Pradad (2004) , p.10.

研究生招生制度研究 - 学位认证

4 经贸英语精选（第二版）

China is not a simple story of specialization according to comparative advantage4. While labor intensive5 exports (toys, garments, simple electronics assembly) have always played an important role in China’s export basket, China also exports a wide range of highly sophisticated products. Indeed, a major argument of this paper is that China is an outlier in terms of the overall sophistication of its exports: Its export bundle is that of a country with an income-per-capita6 level three times higher than China’s. China has somehow managed to latch on to advanced, high-productivity products that one would not normally expect China to produce, let alone export. I will provide some evidence below that suggests this has been an important contributor to China’s recent growth. China’s experience indicates that it is not how much you export, but what you export that matters.

The extent to which China’s sophisticated export basket has been a direct consequence of its unorthodox policy regime is not clear. But it is not too much of a stretch to imagine that China’s industrial structure has indeed been shaped by policies of promotion and protection, just as in the cases of earlier East Asian tigers7. I will return to this theme at the end of the paper, and offer some general remarks that may help frame future policy decisions in the general areas of trade and industrialization.

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