An Empirical Study of the Structural Changes and Evolution of International Competitiveness of China's Foreign Trade Industries

This paper adopts China's import and export data at 3-digit and 4-digit levels in the UN Comtrade database from 1978 to 2009 and the date from theStatistical Classification of China's High-Tech Industriesof China's National Bureau of Statistics,refers to the statue of competitiveness of China's foreign trade industries with the index of international competitiveness,and describes the development path of China's foreign trade industries for more than 30 years since the reform and opening up and the trend of international competitiveness by making use of the time series changes in various industries.The results indicate that the structure of China's foreign trade industries tends to optimize and China's international competitiveness has been increasing step by step.On the whole,the competitive advantages in the labor-intensive industries will be maintained,the competitiveness in the capital-intensive industries has been enhanced,but in the high-tech industries China has few industries with strong competitiveness.China still needs to enhance the competitiveness of her foreign trade industries when transiting from a large country of foreign trade into a strong one.