Experts call for more efforts to bolster trade in services

As China charts its course through the intricacies and uncertainties of the global trade climate, the emphasis on expanding trade in services is gaining increasing importance, particularly in harnessing the immense potential of knowledge-intensive services and digital transformation, analysts said on Monday. In the first half of the year, China's trade in services maintained robust growth momentum, with the total volume of service imports and exports reaching about 3.6 trillion yuan, up 14 percent year-on-year, the Ministry of Commerce said on Friday. Of the total service trade volume, exports accounted for 1.47 trillion yuan, an increase of 10.7 percent compared with the same period last year, while imports climbed 16.4 percent year-on-year to 2.13 trillion yuan, according to the ministry. The tertiary sector, another term for the service sector, accounted for 56.7 percent of China's total GDP in the first half of the year, according to the National Bureau of Statistics, while cross-border services trade, as shown by data from the ministry, only accounted for 22 percent of total global trade volume last year. Xie Yiqing, an associate researcher at the Shanghai Academy of Social Sciences' Institute of China Studies, said that knowledge-intensive services, which represent around 40 percent of China's total service trade volume, still fall below the levels commonly observed in developed economies.