China News Service, Nanjing, October 13 (Reporter Shen Ran) The 2021 Global Service Trade Conference was held on the 13th in Nanjing, Jiangsu.
At the meeting, the Chinese Academy of International Trade and Economic Cooperation issued the "Global Service Trade Development Index Report (2021)".
The report shows that China's service trade structure has undergone profound changes, thanks to the large-scale pilot projects in the free trade pilot zone, which has promoted a significant increase in China's service trade rankings in the world.
After a comparative analysis of 80 economies around the world, the report concludes that, compared with the 20th place in 2020, China's service trade ranking will increase significantly in 2021, jumping to the 14th place in the world.
Among them, the scale index of China's service trade rose from 8th to 4th, the structural index rose from 67th to 53rd, and the status index rose from 8th to 5th.
Zhang Wei, vice president of the Institute of International Trade and Economic Cooperation of the Ministry of Commerce of the People’s Republic of China, said: “Under the impact of the epidemic, the structure of China’s service trade has changed. Larger shocks. Countries or economies whose main structure is knowledge-intensive are relatively small, while those whose main structure is travel are relatively large. Fortunately, China continues to deepen reforms Opening up, promoting the construction of pilot free trade zones, continuous optimization of the business environment, and continuous consolidation of the service industry foundation have become the main internal reason for the relative stability of China's index."
The report specifically mentions the experience gained in China's large-scale pilot free trade zone.
According to the report, as of 2021, China has established 21 pilot free trade zones, the negative list system for foreign investment access has been continuously improved, and institutional innovation and differentiated reforms have continued to advance.
As of 2020, a total of 260 institutional innovations have been replicated and promoted nationwide.
Among them, the Hainan Free Trade Port is a strategic choice for China to promote a higher level of opening up. In particular, the free trade port’s cross-border service trade negative list is China’s first negative list in the field of cross-border service trade, and it is also China’s initiative to promote the service sector. An important measure of high-level institutional opening.
At the same time, the comprehensive pilot program for expanding the opening up of the service industry is an important deployment for China's service sector to implement a new round of high-level opening up.
In April 2021, Tianjin, Shanghai, Hainan, and Chongqing were approved by the State Council to successfully carry out comprehensive pilot projects for expanding and opening up the service industry. This is also the first expansion from outside Beijing.
The report pointed out: China’s service trade innovation development pilot has moved from the pilot initial stage in 2016 to the comprehensive deepening stage in 2020, focusing more on promoting the opening of wide-area and high-level service industries, and placing more emphasis on the institutional opening of the service industry, which is more prominent. The reform and opening up of the service industry has promoted the development of service trade.
The pilot areas are also becoming veritable innovation highlands for the service trade system.
“From 2012 to 2019, thanks to the continuous opening up of the service industry, China’s contribution to the growth of global service imports reached 15.7%, spurring a 5.5% increase in global service imports. Affected by the epidemic in 2020, China’s service imports and exports have increased significantly compared to the same period last year. Decline (-15.7%), but the rate of decrease is 3.5 percentage points lower than that of the global. In the context of a sharp decline in global cross-border direct investment, the utilization of foreign investment in China’s service industry still increased by 13.9% year-on-year.” Zhang Wei also reminded, “There is still a service industry in China. Insufficient openness has led to insufficient motivation for the sustainable development of service trade, and insufficient development of service trade has led to problems such as lower actual openness of the service industry. In the future, China needs to continue to enhance the coordination of service industry opening and service trade development to form service industry opening and service The benign interaction of the coordinated development of trade." (End)