Structural Changes in the Dynamics of China’s Exports and Imports

The economic policy pursued has turned China into a major trading power. In terms of GDP, the Chinese economy has been the first economy in the world for a number of recent years; China’s rapidly growing trade flows have made it the largest trading partner for many countries. Over the past twenty years there has been rapid growth in exports and imports. The article puts forward a hypothesis about the presence of structural instability in the dynamics of Chinese exports for the period from 2000 to 2020. The hypothesis was confirmed and two periods were identified in the dynamics of exports and imports with different natures of the main development trend: from 2000 to 2008 and from 2009 to 2020. For each stage, trend equations were selected that describe the dynamics of exports and imports and an interval forecast of indexes for 2021 was made.
Materials and methods. During the work, dynamic, structural analysis of analytical and statistical information was used; methods of analytical, logical, systemic, correlation and regression analysis were used, as well as analysis of structural changes. The analysis was carried out using the Statistica 10.0 program.
Results. A change in the value of the import coverage ratio by exports was revealed before and after structural changes in the dynamics of the main foreign economic indexes and an assessment of their statistical significance was given. An analysis of the influence of export dynamics on GDP dynamics was carried out and it was found that before structural changes, the influence of export dynamics on GDP dynamics was statistically insignificant, and after a structural change, export dynamics began to have a direct impact on changes in China’s GDP.
Conclusion. Analysis of official statistical data on the main indexes of China’s foreign economic activity for the period from 2000 to 2020 allowed us to note that the volume of Chinese exports increased over the period 2010-2019 from $1.58 trillion in 2010 (10.34% of global exports), to $2.50 trillion in 2019 (12.81% of global exports). In 2019, China continued to rank first in terms of export value among all countries in the world. Despite the challenging year of 2020, China’s exports reached almost 2.6 trillion US dollars and increased by 4% compared to 2019.
China also occupies a leading position in the export of high-tech goods - their volume is 731.9 billion US dollars, the share of exports in the global volume is 25%. At the same time, the dynamics of Chinese exports for the period from 2000 to 2020 was heterogeneous and characterized by structural instability. Two stages can be distinguished with different characteristics of the main development trend: from 2000 to 2008 and from 2009 to 2020. Based on this, the authors came to the conclusion that to describe the main trend in the development of export and import dynamics for the period from 2000 to 2008, the exponential model is best suited. To describe the main trend in the development of export and import dynamics in the period from 2009 to 2020 - logarithmic model. A study of the consistency of changes in export and import volumes showed that in the period from 2009 to 2020 was characterized by greater consistency in China’s main foreign trade flows than the period from 2000 to 2008. In the period before the structural change in the dynamics of exports and imports, the coverage ratio varied from 105.7% to 127.6%; in the period after the structural change, the coverage ratio changed from 108.9% to 135.4%.
Checking the statistical significance of the differences in the coefficient of coverage of imports by exports before and after the structural change showed that the differences are not statistically significant. In the period from 2000 to 2008 the dynamics of China’s exports did not have a statistically significant impact on the dynamics of the country’s GDP. From 2009 to 2020 after structural changes in the nature of the dynamics of the main indexes of China’s foreign trade, changes in exports began to have a statistically significant impact on the dynamics of GDP. A 1% increase in China’s exports now results in a 0.25% increase in GDP.
The practical significance of the paper is determined by the developed methodology for analyzing structural changes in the dynamics of exports and imports, examined using the example of China.

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