People's Daily Online, Beijing, October 1 (Sun Yang) Today, People's Daily Online Finance learned from the Ministry of Commerce that from January to August, due to the superimposed effects of the new crown pneumonia epidemic and other factors, the scale of my country's service trade declined, but service exports performed significantly better than imports , The trade deficit is reduced; the proportion of knowledge-intensive service trade continues to increase, showing strong resistance to shocks.

In the first eight months, my country's total service imports and exports totaled 2989.62 billion yuan (RMB, the same below), a year-on-year decrease of 16.3%.

Among them, exports were 1,237 trillion yuan, down 2.2%; imports were 1,752.62 billion yuan, down 24%.

Mainly present the following characteristics:

　　The deficit in trade in services has been substantially reduced.

From January to August, the decline in China's service exports was 21.8 percentage points lower than that of imports, driving the service trade deficit to fall by 50.6% to 515.62 billion yuan, a year-on-year decrease of 527.52 billion yuan.

　　Knowledge-intensive service trade shows strong resistance to shocks.

Since the beginning of this year, despite the severe impact caused by the superposition of factors such as the epidemic situation and Sino-US economic and trade frictions, China's knowledge-intensive service trade has always shown a good development trend.

From January to August, the import and export of knowledge-intensive services was RMB 1,317.39 billion, an increase of 8.5%, accounting for 44.1% of the total service import and export, an increase of 10.1 percentage points.

Among them, knowledge-intensive service exports amounted to 692.89 billion yuan, an increase of 8.5%, accounting for 56% of total service exports, an increase of 5.5 percentage points; the areas where exports grew faster were intellectual property royalties, telecommunications, computer and information services, and insurance services. , Increased by 29.9%, 15.8%, and 13.4% respectively.

Imports of knowledge-intensive services amounted to 624.5 billion yuan, an increase of 8.5%, accounting for 35.6% of total service imports, an increase of 10.7 percentage points; the areas where imports grew faster were financial services, telecommunications, computer and information services, and insurance services, which increased by 26.7 respectively. %, 25.3%, 20.1%.

　　Travel services have been severely affected by the epidemic.

The epidemic and measures adopted by various countries to strictly restrict the movement of people across borders have severely affected the import and export of travel services worldwide.

From January to August, my country's travel services import and export amounted to 724.89 billion yuan, a decrease of 45.8%, an increase of 1.2 percentage points from January to July; of which exports fell by 42.5% and imports fell by 46.2%.

Excluding travel services, my country's service imports and exports from January to August were basically the same as the same period last year.