China-Pakistan service trade cooperation to grow in future: Chinese scholar

BEIJING: There are broad prospects for China-Pakistan service trade cooperation, China Economic Net (CEN) reported on Thursday quoting Chinese scholar Prof. Cheng Xizhong.

According to Prof. Cheng last September, China International Fair for Trade in Services 2020 was successfully held in Beijing, which shows that China attaches great importance to service trade. Since China joined WTO in 2001, the total import and export volume of China’s service trade increased from 71.9 billion U.S. dollars to 743.4 billion U.S. dollars in 2019, that is to say, it has increased 10 times in the past 20 years. In 2019, the added value of China’s service industry accounts for 53.9% of its total GDP, and will continue to increase. In the future, the structure of China’s service trade will gradually upgrade, and the export of service trade will gradually tend to the areas with obvious “scale economy effect”, such as R&D, design, brand, etc.

Now, world trade in services accounts for 25% of the total world trade. WTO predicts that the proportion of service trade will be higher and higher, and it will increase to 50% by 2040. Analysts believe that the higher the proportion of service industry in a country, the more developed its economy will be. In 2019, the American service industry reached 17.36 trillion U.S. dollars, accounting for 81% of its total GDP.

The American economic structure has already completed the transformation to service industry. Its real advantages lie in its strong service economic foundation, advanced information technology infrastructure, standardized and flexible business system and good innovation environment. Pakistan`s service export fell by over 16.79 percent year-on-year to 352.92 million U.S. dollars in the second month of the current fiscal year.