关键词: 贸易顺差 , 增加值贸易 , 全球价值链 , 人民币汇率 , 外商直接投资

Abstract:

There has been great political and economic attention paid to the long term trade imbalance in China, and particularly to the bilateral trade deficit with the US.In this context, identifying the determinants of the Chinas trade balance has been a key issue for policymakers on both sides. However, in most existing studies, the nature and significance of international fragmentation production in the determination of bilateral trade balance has not been considered explicitly. The mainly reason is that the conventional grosstrade based measure of bilateral trade balance used in these works can cause a crucial “double” counting problem when intermediate inputs cross multiple borders. In this paper, using the international inputoutput based measure of “trade in valueadded”, which can remove the double counting when estimating sources and destination of value in bilateral trade, we reidentify the determinants of the USChina trade balance. Our results show that the macroeconomic forces and foreign direct investment (FDI) in China are mostly responsible for Chinas trade surplus in the short and long run, while the official exchange rate play a smaller role in the long run. As a policy implication, China should keep RMB stable at least in the short run and put more efforts on industry restructuring in the long run.

Key words: trade surplus , trade in valueadded , global value chain , RMB , FDI