Structural Change in China's Import and Export

Abstract

This article employs the schemes of structural change test on time series of export, import, and net export of China sampled from January 1981 to December 2006 to investigate effects of the change of international trade environment and domestic policy on the foreign trade. By constructing test models, Critical values for unit-root test against piecewise-trend stationarity with two endogenous breakpoints are created for all the six alternative specifications on Mont Carlo simulation. It was revealed in the result that although the import from 1981 to 2006 was a unit root series determined by the growth of the economy, the export was a piecewise stationary series that suffered two or more breaks, one of which was collected in mid-2001 associated to the entrance to the WTO, and the others on February 1994, July 19967, and November 1997, respectively correlated to their corresponding events.