The Fifth Plenary Session of the 19th Central Committee of the Communist Party of China proposed that “it is necessary to build a new higher-level open economic system, comprehensively improve the level of opening up, promote trade and investment liberalization and facilitation, and promote trade innovation and development”, which is the “14th Five-Year Plan”. During the period, my country used the promotion of trade innovation and development to enhance the comprehensive competitiveness of foreign trade, and pointed out the direction and path.
Promoting the development of trade innovation includes two meanings, namely stability and innovation.
From the first level of meaning, to achieve innovative development, we must first stabilize the foundation.
Trade is a bridge that connects two domestic and international markets and two resources. It is of great significance for ensuring enterprises, stabilizing employment, stabilizing foreign investment, and maintaining the stability of the industrial chain and supply chain, and thus building a new development pattern.
At the same time, the stable development of China's foreign trade is also conducive to the stability and prosperity of the global economy.
As the world’s second largest economy, China firmly upholds the multilateral trading system and promotes trade and investment liberalization and facilitation, which will play an important supporting role in stabilizing the confidence and expectations of countries in economic globalization; as the largest in more than 100 countries and regions As a trading partner, the sustained and stable growth of China's economy will play an important role in stabilizing the export demand, employment and even the macro economy of various countries; as the core country of one of the three global production networks, the stable operation of China's production system will help the world fight the new crown The pneumonia epidemic and economic recovery provide important material supplies, including anti-epidemic materials, production equipment, and intermediate inputs.
From the second level of meaning, the promotion of trade development needs to find new growth points and continue to promote technological innovation, institutional innovation, model and business format innovation.
It should be noted that the evolution of international trade has roughly gone through three stages: one is the traditional trade stage based on final products, the other is the global value chain trade stage based on intermediate goods, and the third is based on service and digitalization. New stage of trade.
Since the reform and opening up, my country's foreign trade has achieved leapfrog development, but compared with the world's leading countries, there is still a clear gap in the technological content of products, service trade and digital trade.
At present and in the future, on the one hand, we must strive to increase technological independent innovation and produce internationally competitive high-value-added products. On the other hand, we must provide a suitable policy environment for the development of new trade through institutional innovation.
For example, to develop digital trade, it is necessary to make breakthroughs in the supervision of the cross-border flow of data; to develop re-export trade, it is necessary to improve the level of customs clearance facilitation.
Participating further in global trade governance and enhancing institutional discourse power is also an important part of promoting trade innovation and development. On the basis of establishing and improving various risk prevention and control systems and mechanisms, and maintaining the bottom line of systemic risks, actively implement the free trade zone promotion strategy, negotiate large-scale free trade agreements with major economies, and accelerate the establishment of high global standards The free trade zone network creates a stable, fair and predictable external environment for trade development. In the future, free trade ports, free trade pilot zones, and service trade innovation development pilot projects will become the "vanguard" of my country's trade innovation and development. They will carry out in-depth institutional innovations to standardize high-level international economic and trade rules, further intensify the opening stress test, and accelerate the transformation from the opening of commodity and factor flow to the opening of rules and other institutions. (Author: State Council Development Research Center of Foreign Economic Research Department researcher Lu Gang)