Assessing the export competitiveness of Chinese industries

The article presents a framework for measuring, illustrating and comparing industry export competitiveness that takes into account (a) industry specialization, (b) industry export growth rate, and (c) relative industry size. We apply the framework to a dataset of 97 different industries from China over a five year period (2001-2005). According to our results, over 70% of Chinese industries are “dynamic,” meaning that their export growth is higher than the world average export growth. Almost 50% of the Chinese industries examined are competitive in global markets, with 20-25% of the world export market share in their respective industry. Our results also suggest that the more an industry becomes specialized, the higher its world market share in terms of exports. The framework developed is innovative in its conceptualization and can be used in a variety of contexts to model industry export competitiveness.