张军教授英文论文在SSCI杂志China and World Economy上发表
张军教授的英文论文The Foreign Value Added in China’s Manufactured Exports （with Yubo Zhan and Dongbo Tang）在SSCI杂志China and World Economy(vol. 20, no. 1, Jan-Feb.,2012)上发表。
The Foreign Value Added in China’s Manufactured Exports: An Estimate Using Trade Data and Implication for China’s Trade Imbalance
Abstract
Economists have recently become interested in weighting how much domestic value added is actually included in China’s exports. Formally, the proportion between foreign and domestic contents could be identified by calculating VS share (Vertical Specialization share) through non-competitive I/O (input-output) tables. Application of such method to Chinese case, however, would result in a serious measurement bias because processing exports which include disproportionately higher share of imported intermediates dominate in China’s manufacturing exports, and such I/O tables that could statistically separate processing trade from ordinary trade are not officially released in China. This paper, by directly employing trade data in the year of 2008 in which imported intermediates in both processing and non-processing trade could be identified through various trade patterns, provides a simplified way to estimating the share of foreign/domestic value-added included in industry-level manufacturing exports. Based on the estimated results for 115 3-digit manufacturing industries, this paper finds that the VS share (or the share of foreign value added) included in China’s exports weighted by industries was 32.22% in 2008, and that included in China’s processing exports was about 56% in 2008, compared to about 10 % for ordinary exports. It also finds that the sectors that experienced fast expansion of processing exports have much higher share of foreign contents and thus lower domestic value added share. Since processing exports account for about half of Chinese exports, the prevailing trade statistics, which focuses on gross values rather than the value added of exports and imports, has obviously overstated the bilateral trade imbalances, especially between China and the US.
JEL Classification: F10, F14, O10
Keywords: value added, vertical specialization, processing trade
