TY  - JOUR
AU  - Wang, Zhi
AU  - Wei, Shang-Jin
TI  - What Accounts for the Rising Sophistication of China's Exports?
JF  - National Bureau of Economic Research Working Paper Series
VL  - No. 13771
PY  - 2008
Y2  - February 2008
DO  - 10.3386/w13771
UR  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13771
L1  - http://www.nber.org/papers/w13771.pdf
N1  - Author contact info:
Zhi Wang
Schar School of Policy and Government
George Mason Universty
3351 Fairfax Drive, MS 3B1,
Alington, VA 22201
E-Mail: zwang36@gmu.edu

Shang-Jin Wei
Graduate School of Business
Columbia University
Uris Hall 619
3022 Broadway
New York, NY 10027-6902
Tel: 212/854-9139
E-Mail: shangjin.wei@columbia.edu
M1  - published as Zhi Wang, Shang-Jin Wei. "What Accounts for the Rising Sophistication of China's Exports?," in Robert C. Feenstra and Shang-Jin Wei, editors, "China's Growing Role in World Trade" University of Chicago Press (2010)

M3  - presented at "China and World Trade Conference", August 3-4, 2007
AB  - Chinese exports have become increasingly sophisticated. This has generated anxiety in developed countries as competitive pressure may increasingly be felt outside labor-intensive industries. Using product-level data on exports from different cities within China, this paper investigates the contributing factors to China's rising export sophistication. Somewhat surprisingly, neither processing trade nor foreign invested firms are found to play an important role in generating the increased overlap between China's export structure and that of high-income countries. Instead, improvement in human capital and government policies in the form of tax-favored high-tech zones appear to be the key to the country's evolving export structure. On the other hand, processing trade, foreign invested firms, and government-sponsored high-tech zones all have contributed significantly to raising the unit values of Chinese exports within a given product category.
ER  -