China's High-Tech Exports: The Myth and Reality

Yuqing Xing

Asian Economic Papers, 2014, vol. 13, issue 1, 109-123

Abstract: Trade statistics portray China as the largest exporter of high-tech products. This paper demonstrates that China's leading position in high-tech exports is a myth created by outdated trade statistics, which are inconsistent with trade based on global supply chains. Current trade statistics mistakenly credit entire values of assembled high-tech products to China, thus greatly inflating its exports. This paper adopted a value-added approach to more accurately measure high-tech exports, revealing that, in 2009, China's value-added accounted for only about 3 percent of the total value attributed for its exports of iPhones and laptop PCs. Furthermore, if assembly is the only source of value-added by Chinese workers, in terms of technological contribution, these assembled high-tech exports are indifferent from labor-intensive products, and so they should be excluded from the high-tech classification. © 2014 The Earth Institute at Columbia University and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.

Keywords: China; exports; high-tech; value-added; iPhone (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F10 N75 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (12)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.mitpressjournals.org/doi/pdf/10.1162/ASEP_a_00256 link to full text PDF (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers.

Related works:
Working Paper: China's High-tech Exports: Myth and Reality (2011)
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:tpr:asiaec:v:13:y:2014:i:1:p:109-123

Ordering information: This journal article can be ordered from
https://mitpressjour ... rnal/?issn=1535-3516

Access Statistics for this article

Asian Economic Papers is currently edited by Wing Thye Woo, Sungbae An, Fukunari Kimura and Ming Lu

More articles in Asian Economic Papers from MIT Press
Bibliographic data for series maintained by The MIT Press ().