The head of the Department of service and trade of the Ministry of Commerce recently introduced the general situation of China's service trade from January to July 2020. Novel coronavirus pneumonia was affected by factors such as the new crown pneumonia epidemic in China from 1 to July. However, the scale of China's service trade declined, but the export performance of services was significantly better than that of imports, and the trade deficit decreased.
Specifically, the service trade in the first seven months showed the following characteristics:
In July, the growth rate of service exports turned from negative to positive. In July, China's service exports reached 172.5 billion yuan, an increase of 3.3%. Among them, the export of personal cultural and entertainment services was 1.04 billion yuan, an increase of 65.8%; the export of transportation was 34.46 billion yuan, an increase of 26.9%; the export of telecommunications, computer and information services was 45.41 billion yuan, an increase of 24.3%; the export of financial services was 2.22 billion yuan, an increase of 20.3%.
The trade deficit in services has been greatly reduced. From January to July, the decline in China's service exports narrowed, while the decline in imports increased. The decline in exports was 21.4 percentage points less than that in imports, which led to a decrease of 49.4% in the deficit of service trade to 448.77 billion yuan, a decrease of 438.35 billion yuan year on year.
The proportion of knowledge intensive service trade increased. From January to July, China's import and export of knowledge intensive services reached 1151.34 billion yuan, an increase of 8.9%, accounting for 44% of the total import and export of services, an increase of 9.7 percentage points. Among them, the export of knowledge intensive services reached 610.3 billion yuan, an increase of 9.7%, accounting for 56.2% of the total export of services, an increase of 5.7 percentage points; the areas with rapid growth in export were intellectual property use fees, insurance services, telecommunications and computer and information services, with an increase of 31.9%, 12.9% and 16.9% respectively. The import of knowledge intensive services reached 541.04 billion yuan, an increase of 8%, accounting for 35.3% of the total import of services, an increase of 10.1 percentage points; the areas with rapid growth in import were telecommunications, computer and information services, and financial services, with an increase of 28.5% and 16.6% respectively.
The import and export of travel services decreased. The epidemic situation and strict restrictions on cross-border movement of people continue to affect the import and export of travel services worldwide. From January to July, China's import and export of travel services totaled 639.11 billion yuan, a decrease of 44.6%, an increase of 1.7 percentage points compared with that from January to June. Among them, exports decreased by 43.4% and imports decreased by 44.8%, which led to the overall decline of service trade. Excluding travel services, China's import and export of services increased by 2.4% from January to July, including export growth of 4.3% and import growth of 0.4%.
Experts said that in recent years, China's trade in services has witnessed rapid development and has increasingly become a new bright spot in stabilizing foreign trade. Although the export of high value-added and technology intensive fields such as intellectual property use fees, telecommunications, computers and information services is growing rapidly, the overall scale is still relatively small, and the trade structure needs to be optimized. In the future, China International Service Trade Fair 2020 should be taken as an opportunity to promote domestic service enterprises to improve service standards, efficiency and level, and further increase the proportion of service trade in total foreign trade.