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Assessing the export competitiveness of Chinese industries

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Abstract

This article presents a framework for measuring, illustrating and comparing industry export competitiveness that takes into account (i) industry specialization, (ii) industry export growth rate and (iii) relative industry size. We apply the framework to a data set of 97 different industries from China over a 5-year period (2001–2005). According to our results, over 70 per cent of Chinese industries are ‘dynamic’, meaning that their export growth is higher than the world average export growth. Almost 50 per cent of the Chinese industries examined are competitive in global markets, with 20–25 per cent 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.

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Acknowledgements

We would like to thank the Alexander von Humboldt Foundation for sponsoring parts of this research.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Rollins College, Crummer Graduate School of Business and Rollins China Center, 1000 Holt Avenue, Winter Park, 32789, FL, USA

    Marc Fetscherin, Ilan Alon & James P Johnson

Authors
  1. Marc Fetscherin
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  2. Ilan Alon
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  3. James P Johnson
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Correspondence to Marc Fetscherin.

Appendix

Appendix

See Table A1.

Table a1 Two-digit HS codes
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Fetscherin, M., Alon, I. & Johnson, J. Assessing the export competitiveness of Chinese industries. Asian Bus Manage 9, 401–424 (2010). https://doi.org/10.1057/abm.2010.13

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