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Since the adoption of reform and opening-up policy, China’s export trade showed a rapid development, trade quantity expanded quickly, but limited by structural supply shortage of labor, rising costs, imbalance of trade competitiveness and other factors, the export trade based on low quality and low value-added products is unsustainable. Therefore, whether the government can achieve sustainable development of export trade and really improve our country’s competitiveness in the international market, depends on the change of quality of export products.In order to examine the quality trend of China’s export products comprehensively, the paper employed the export quality ranking method, price quality range method, RCA analysis and RSCA analysis to analyze and compare the quality of our country’s export products, combined with the national industrial classification. Based on the analysis, we found that in the period of2000-2010, the overall quality of China’s export products is below the world average, low-quality products still dominated China’s export trade, the growth of middle-quality products has been accelerated recently, but cannot change the fact of our trade situation. Besides, the paper also made a detailed analysis of some typical subordinates manufacturing industries.Secondly, based on Hallak&Schott (2009) product quality index model, the paper measured the quality index of manufacturing export products in China and other six sample countries. The results turned out that in the period of2000-2010, the quality index of China is improve steadily, but compared with Japan, Singapore, South Korea and other OECD countries, there still exists a big gap. Among the manufacturing industry, electrical machinery and instrumentation industry performed well. After the revision of the model and excluded the processing trade, the quality index was significantly lower than the original value, which indicated that the effect of processing trade caused the overestimate of export quality in2000-2010.Finally, on the basis of product quality index of manufacturing exports, the paper measured the impact of processing trade, foreign direct investment, R&D investment and other factors on the quality of manufactured products exported. The result was that the processing trade, labor costs, R&D investment and per capita GDP had a significant positive correlation with the quality index, where labor costs and processing trade had a greater contribution to the improvement of the quality of manufacturing exports.According to the analysis, this paper proposed three policy recommendations: first, adjust the existing trade patterns and promote the transformation and upgrading of processing trade; secondly, make rational utilization of foreign investment, and avoid over-dependence; finally, increase R&D investment, and strengthen the supervision and feedback system at the same time, to improve the output performance.
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