The Comparative Advantages and Trade Gains of China in the Global Value Chains

The paper analyzes the comparative advantages and international trade gains among China and USA, EU and Japan on different factor-intensive products within the global value chains (GVC) by the CTB index using the OECD-WTO Trade in Value Added data. We find that the allocation of international trade gains in GVC is consistent with the distribution of the comparative advantage. China is still the biggest workshop in the world focusing on the manufacturing, however, the comparative advantages extends within the GVC, especially on R&D intensive goods. We also find the absolute trade gains of China grow with the trade scale enlargement and the relative trade gains also increase after a long period of deterioration.