There is still room for improvement in service trade (People's Review) Service | Trade | Review
Knowledge intensive services with high added value and good growth potential are an important development trend in global service trade at present
Service trade is an important component of international trade and an important field of international economic and trade cooperation. A welcome change in recent years is that knowledge intensive service trade has grown into a new engine driving the growth of China's service trade. The data recently released by the Ministry of Commerce shows that from January to April this year, the import and export of knowledge intensive service trade reached 905.79 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 13.1%, accounting for 43.5% of the total import and export of services. Among them, the export of knowledge intensive services reached 538.48 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 18%. The rapid growth of knowledge intensive service trade with high added value and high technological content indicates that China's competitiveness in service exports has significantly increased and is climbing towards the high-end of the value chain.
In fact, knowledge intensive service trade, mainly focused on insurance, finance, personal culture and entertainment, telecommunications, computer and information services, and intellectual property usage fees, has long played a stabilizing role in the development of China's service trade. Data shows that from 2012 to 2021, the average annual growth rate of China's import and export of knowledge intensive services reached 9.3%, an increase of 10.3 percentage points. This fully reflects the positive results of China's promotion of innovative development in the modern service industry.
The sudden rise of knowledge intensive service trade is driven by the rapid development of China's digital economy. On the one hand, digital technology has widely penetrated into various aspects of the national economic cycle, such as production, circulation, consumption, and distribution, greatly improving the tradability of services and giving birth to new forms and models of service trade such as cross-border e-commerce, online healthcare, and supply chain collaborative management platforms. On the other hand, the development of digital technologies such as artificial intelligence, the Internet of Things, and blockchain has changed the way goods and services are produced, traded, and consumed, promoting the deep integration of modern service industries with advanced manufacturing and modern agriculture, and increasing the demand for service trade cooperation. In 2022, the scale of digitally deliverable service trade in China reached 2.5 trillion yuan, an increase of 78.6% compared to five years ago.
In addition to actively embracing the wave of digitization and intelligence, China has also continuously deepened the reform of the service industry, orderly promoted the opening up of the service industry, promoted the improvement of quality and efficiency in the service industry, and enhanced its ability to go global. Since 2017, China has revised the negative list of foreign investment access five times in a row, canceling or relaxing restrictions on the proportion of foreign investment in service industries such as value-added telecommunications, securities, banking, insurance, and cultural performances; The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership Agreement has officially come into effect, adding 22 new service sectors and improving the level of openness of 37 service sectors in China; Taking the lead in exploring the negative list management system for cross-border service trade in Hainan, and expanding and improving the quality of open platforms such as the pilot program for innovative development of service trade... A series of innovative measures to relax market access in the service industry and promote institutional openness in the service industry have driven global factor resources to enter the Chinese market, creating better conditions for enhancing the added value and technological content of China's service trade.
Currently, China's service trade maintains rapid growth and the industry structure is continuously optimized. However, there is still considerable room for improvement in competitiveness and added value. To promote China's service trade to a new level, we need to fully leverage the advantages of massive data and rich application scenarios, accelerate the digitalization process of service trade, and accelerate the development of new forms and models of service trade. At the same time, attention should be paid to creating an open, transparent, inclusive, and non discriminatory industry development ecosystem, and cultivating competitive advantages in characteristic service trade through shared development opportunities.
Knowledge intensive services have high added value and good growth potential, which is an important driving force for the overall growth of service trade and also an important development trend in global service trade. In the face of profound adjustments in the global trade landscape, adhering to open cooperation and mutual benefit, continuously improving policy support systems, enhancing the level of openness in the service sector, and promoting high-quality Chinese services to "go global", we can inject more new momentum into the world economy while achieving high-quality development.