China News Service, October 15th. Why did the service trade deficit narrow sharply in the first eight months of this year?
Gao Feng, a spokesperson for the Ministry of Commerce, pointed out today that the main reasons are that "service exports show strong resilience" and "travel service imports have fallen sharply".
Data map: Moldovan exhibitors introduce products to visitors.
Photo by China News Agency reporter Tian Yuhao
The Ministry of Commerce held a regular press conference today.
A reporter asked: From January to August this year, my country's service trade deficit was reduced by half compared with the same period last year, to 515.62 billion yuan. What is the reason?
How to evaluate the development of service trade this year?
In this regard, Gao Feng pointed out that since the beginning of this year, due to multiple factors such as the new crown pneumonia epidemic, "the overall scale of my country's service trade has declined, but the deficit has narrowed, the structure has improved, and the proportion of knowledge-intensive service trade has continued to increase."
Talking about the reasons for the sharply narrowing of the service trade deficit in the first eight months of this year, Gao Feng said that first of all, this is a continuation of the trend in recent years.
"With the improvement of the international competitiveness of my country's service trade, since 2017, the growth rate of my country's service exports has been higher than that of imports. The deficit in 2019 has fallen by 176 billion yuan from the previous year. This year, despite the impact of the epidemic This trend has continued, and the decline in service exports is 21.8 percentage points less than that in imports, driving the deficit to continue to narrow."
Secondly, service exports show strong resilience.
From January to August this year, my country's service exports fell by 2.2%, which was smaller than the major service trade countries in the world.
In particular, the export of knowledge-intensive services grew by 8.5% against the trend, reaching 692.89 billion yuan, accounting for 56% of the total service exports, an increase of 5.5%. The areas where the exports grew faster were intellectual property royalties, telecommunications, computers, and Information services and insurance services increased by 29.9%, 15.8% and 13.4% respectively.
Furthermore, imports of travel services have fallen sharply.
Travel service imports have always accounted for a large proportion of my country's service imports, accounting for more than 50% in 2019.
Gao Feng pointed out that since the beginning of this year, due to the impact of the new crown pneumonia epidemic, Chinese citizens’ outbound travel has been significantly reduced. "In the first eight months of this year, my country’s travel service imports fell by 46.2%, resulting in a 24% drop in overall service imports. An important reason for the decline."