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| Construction of China’s Independent Knowledge System for Open Economics: Dynamic Competitive Advantage Theory and Empowering Trade Policies |
| Huang Xianhai, Song Xueyin |
| School of Economics, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou 310058, China |
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Abstract Reviewing the historical facts since 1978, China’s open economy has not merely witnessed an ultra-long-term leapfrog expansion in scale. Instead, it has undergone all-round and multi-threaded comprehensive transformations. These include a rapid upgrade of the trade structure, a swift iteration of leading new-product trade, partial breakthroughs that pioneer the world trade frontiers, and a rapid evolution of the trade liberalization level. This typical scenario poses a formidable challenge to the neoclassical trade theory centered on comparative advantage and the new trade theory centered on economies of scale. The paper advances a dynamic competitive advantage theory capable of providing a consistent interpretation of the performance of China’s open economy. It is a new international economic theory grounded in the mechanisms of acquired factors, compound late-comer advantages, and differential innovation. Corresponding to this is an enabling trade policy characterized by neutral empowerment of trade opportunities, promotion of trade competition, and facilitation of trade innovation. Acquired factors mainly refer to production factors such as human capital, knowledge, technology, and management, which can be developed post-natally. These acquired factors exhibit externalities and increasing returns to scale. They can be not only invested in the production of tradable goods but also possess the capacity to reshape the production efficiency and allocation patterns of endowment factors. The compound late-comer advantage effect implies that in a large late-comer economy with a vast market and the capacity to accommodate the production of multiple products, potential export enterprises can, through late-comer advantages, replace incumbent export enterprises in current products or opt to enter new industries closer to the technological frontier for export. When reaching the quasi-technological frontier stage, they can execute export leapfrogging. The differential innovation effect indicates that economies at the quasi-technological frontier can engage in Schumpeterian innovation through trial-and-error in emerging technologies and industries that are either unknown or in a nascent stage. By doing so, they can pioneer new industrial trade frontiers and secure the next-generation trade competitiveness. Empowering trade policy refers to a dynamic competitive advantage oriented trade policy that neutral empowers enterprises with trade opportunities, factors, and capabilities to promote trade innovation. The dynamic competitive advantage theory can, within an integrated framework and taking the dynamic evolution of technological distance over time as a guiding thread, offer a systematically coherent explanation for the trade development of large developing economies. When the technological level of developing economies lags far behind the world technological frontier, they can rapidly enhance their technological capabilities mainly through the late-comer learning effect. During this period, the supply (both quantity and quality) of acquired factors such as human capital accumulates rapidly, enabling these economies to continuously strengthen their competitiveness within the global trade landscape. When approaching the quasi-technological frontier stage, developing economies can either select technologies not chosen by developed economies from the existing set of new technologies through the late-comer leapfrogging effect to gain trade competitiveness or take the lead in differential innovation in next-generation technologies and industries that are still in a formative stage, thereby attaining differentiated competitiveness in future industrial trade. Throughout the entire dynamic transformation process of trade competitiveness, the expansion of the supply quantity and the improvement of the quality of acquired factors can reduce the dynamic transformation costs of enterprises’ competitive advantages. The enabling trade policy, through neutral factor cultivation, supply, and competitive incentives, compensates for the externalities associated with enterprises’ innovation trials and product transitions, thereby expediting the dynamic transformation process of competitive advantages. In terms of policy effect mechanism, the empowering trade policy, due to its neutral empowering nature, has weak price distortion and avoids the misallocation effect of trade resources statically, reducing the trade threshold for enterprises in developing countries, allowing China’s comparative advantage based on factor prices to be fully utilized, and under the guidance of trade competition mechanism, promoting the rapid convergence of enterprises in developing countries along the technological gap, which is reflected in the rapid upgrading of trade products within the international trade stock product set. Empowering trade policies generally have policy characteristics of market friendliness and competition compatibility. In addition to short-term resource allocation effects, empowering trade policies are more important in expanding the diffusion of trade-related learning effects (trade learning) and the dynamic effects of trade frontier innovation. The expansion of the cultivation and supply of high-level acquired factors such as human capital and data, as well as the establishment of a common infrastructure platform for trade innovation, have reduced the export leapfrogging costs of quasi technology frontier enterprises and also incentivized them to implement differentiated innovation for the next generation of international products. The dynamic competitive advantage theory and the enabling trade policy are highly congruent with the fundamental economic characteristics and abstract connotations of China, a large late-comer country within the context of socialism with Chinese characteristics.
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Received: 02 July 2025
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2025, Vol. 55 
