On July 6, Shu Jueting, the spokesperson of the Ministry of Commerce, introduced at a regular press conference that from January to May 2023, my country's service trade will generally maintain a growth trend. The total import and export of services was 2,605.54 billion yuan (RMB, the same below), a year-on-year increase of 10.2%. Among them, exports were 1,098.22 billion yuan, a decrease of 4.7%; imports were 1,507.32 billion yuan, an increase of 24.2%; the service trade deficit was 409.1 billion yuan.
Zheng Wei, an associate researcher at the China Service Outsourcing Research Center, told the reporter of the Economic Information Daily that the growth of my country's service trade continued to improve from January to May, and the import and export of services achieved double-digit year-on-year growth. It is foreseeable that with the accelerated pace of international cooperation in my country's service industry, the total volume of my country's service trade will hit a new high throughout the year.
It is worth noting that while the total volume maintains rapid growth, the structure of my country's service trade is still showing a trend of continuous optimization, and the proportion of knowledge-intensive service trade has increased. From January to May, the import and export of knowledge-intensive services was 1,122.78 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 13.6%, accounting for 43.1% of the total service import and export, an increase of 1.3 percentage points from the same period of the previous year. Among them, the export of knowledge-intensive services was 656.59 billion yuan, an increase of 17.2%, and the import of knowledge-intensive services was 466.19 billion yuan, an increase of 8.8%.
In Zheng Wei's view, this is a concrete manifestation of the continued improvement in the quality of my country's service trade development. "From the data point of view, my country's knowledge-intensive service trade continued to maintain a rapid growth trend in the first five months, accounting for a steady increase in the proportion of total service imports and exports. .”
Also, travel services are clearly recovering. From January to May, the import and export of travel services was 552.54 billion yuan, a year-on-year increase of 67%, which is the fastest growing service trade field. Among them, exports increased by 53.4%, and imports increased by 68.1%. According to Zheng Wei's analysis, from January to May, my country's travel services achieved leapfrog growth, with a year-on-year increase of over 60%, and the strong recovery momentum has become an important driving force for the steady growth of service trade.
The favorable factors for the development of my country's service trade are still accumulating. Zheng Wei said that with the accelerated popularization of new-generation information technology and the accelerated development of digitization and intelligence, digital trade with digital technology, digital products, digital services, and data information as the subject matter is booming. China's digital industry is developing rapidly. It is now the second largest country in the world's digital economy. It has a number of digital enterprises with strong international comparative advantages. At the same time, it benefits from a super market with a population of 1.4 billion. It provides fertile soil and great potential for development. In the future, digital trade will become a new engine for the development of China's service trade, and will also make greater contributions to the prosperity and development of global trade.