Analysis on Trade Patterns in Electronic and Electrical Products: An Empirical Study of the U.S from 2008 to 2017

Abstract

The development and protection of electronic and electrical industries are essential parts to America’s national strategy. Using data from UNCOMTRADE database, This paper analyzed trade patterns in electronic and electrical products (HT1 category in Rev.2 classification) in the US from 2008 to 2017. By comparing NXR, RSCA and h indicators of individual HT1 product, we found distortions did exit in the export of electronic and electrical products, which hints the US government has established trade barriers to protect intellectual properties and technical innovation of high-tech products. However, it seems harmful to products’ competence improvement in the long run. Further research has been carried out. Introduction High-tech products are technology and information intensive products. They are more and more on centre stages of the US’ economy. Electronic and electrical products are parts of high-tech products that can bring GDP improvement and new job vaccines in the US. The U.S administration under President Donald Trump has implemented restrictive export policies to protect intellectual properties and technical innovations of high-tech products. High-technology exports from the U.S dropped from 32.53% in 1990 to 13.82% in 2017, as a percentage of total manufactured exports. Undoubtedly, the protectionism in trade policies can reduce the U.S’ negative balance of trade, which seems the most important objective of current administration’s trade policy. However, whether the US could benefit more in the long run is the focus discussion of this essay. Measurements and Classification for Trade Patterns Measurements for Trade Patterns RCA( short for the revealed comparative advantage) index, proposed by Balassa [1], is used to measure the relative export performance of a product or a basket of products of the same trait in a country, It is assumed that we could get the indicator through the following modeling: RCAis= (Xis/Xi)/(Xws/Xw) (1) In the above modeling, Xis could be calculated by the export of product s of country i during the empirical period, Xi could be measured by the value of total export of country i during the same measuring period, Xws shows us the value of the world’s export of product s and Xw reports the whole value of export of the world of all kinds of commercial products during the same time path. (Xis/Xi) represents the proportion of the export of product s in the whole export of country i in a certain year.(Xws/Xw) reports the contribution of product s’ export to the world’s total export in a certain year.(Xis/Xi)/(Xws/Xw) shows us the comparison of product s’ export contribution to country i with the world’s average export contribution of product s. If RCA>1, product s contributes more to country i’s export than the world’s average contribution of product s, so we say the export of 2nd International Conference on Electrical and Electronic Engineering (EEE 2019) Copyright © 2019, the Authors. Published by Atlantis Press. This is an open access article under the CC BY-NC license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/). Advances in Engineering Research, volume 185