Assessing the export competitiveness of Chinese industries

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. Asian Business & Management (2010) 9, 401-424. doi: 10.1057/abm.2010.13; published online 30 June 2010