Comparative Study on the Technical Complexity of China and India Service Export and Its Impact Factors

Service sectors are exhibiting increasing importance in domestic economy and service trade attracted more attentions. China and India, as the top emerging economies, are similar in many dimensions, such as population base, social environment, economic policies, and national development strategies. Therefore, their trade in services are comparable. In this paper we used the global service trade data to calculate and compare the technical complexity of service exports between China and India to get some insights for fixing China's problem of export structure and long-term deficit. We selected the data of 34 countries/regions as sample which represented more than 84% of the world's total trade in services from 2005 to 2016, and calculated the technical complexity of China and India's service exports. We established a regression model to discuss the impact factors. The results indicated that the complexity of India's service export technology surpassed China in 2005-2015, and in 2016, China overcame India. The level of economic development and higher education level had a significant positive impact on the complexity of China's service export technology. While the impact of FDI, quality of governance was not significant, the impact of service trade openness and the effect of R&D investment was uncertain.