Decomposing China's Export Growth into Extensive Margin, Export Quality and Quantity Effects

This paper decomposes the growth of China’s export into three parts: growth in the extensive margin, increased quantity and increased prices; we perform a series of empirical analyses using China’s export data at HS-6 digit to analyze the characteristics of China’s export growth. From 1995 to 2010, China’s export growth was mainly driven by quantity growth with a contribution of 66.81%; but if we divide the time period from 1995 to 2010 into five even phases, we find the three parts of export growth show different trends. The contributions of the extensive margin and price changes are decreasing, but quantity shows an increasing trend. China’s export is better than the rest of the world after the financial crisis and in 2008-2010, with a strategy of lowering price and promoting sales in 2009 when facing a slump in export markets; resuming price increases and increasing sales moderately in reaction to improving export conditions in 2010.