China will continue to ease market access in its service sector by further shortening the negative list of foreign investment, Chinese officials said Saturday at the ongoing 2020 China International Fair for Trade in Services in Beijing. 

Photo: VCG

The country will promote the expansion and opening-up of the service industry, accelerate the innovative development of service trade, and foster new growth drivers for high-quality trade development, said Vice Minister of Commerce Wang Bingnan at a forum on emerging trends in the opening-up and development of trade in services. 

"The service economy has become a new driving force for economic growth and a hot spot for global cooperation," Wang said. 

Data shows that the share of service trade in global trade has increased from 7 percent in 1970 to 24 percent last year and the value-added of service trade accounted for 14 percent of GDP last year, up from 4 percent in 1970. 

The WTO predicted that by 2040, service trade will account for 50 percent of global trade, and the prospects for service trade growth are extremely promising. 

According to Wang, despite disruptions caused by COVID-19, the growth of knowledge-intensive service trade, as represented by computer information services, has injected new impetus into the global economic recovery and boosted confidence in it. 

"As the world's second-largest economy, China's service trade has a particularly huge potential for growth. Although China's service trade scale has steadily ranked second in the world, its growth is still lagging compared with China's huge economic scale," said Ma Jiantang, secretary of the CPC Leading Group and vice president of Development Research Center of the State Council. 

In the past five years, China's service trade registered an annual average growth of 4.7 percent, with service imports and exports amounting to 785 billion U.S. dollars in 2019, said Wang, adding that the rapid development of China's trade in services has also made positive contributions to the world economy. 

"The number of skilled talents in China has reached 170 million, and the advantages of human capital have accelerated, attracting a large number of headquarters and R&D institutions of multinational companies to come to China," said Ma. 

"The super-scale market with a population of 1.4 billion is undergoing consumption upgrades and is releasing huge demand for various services such as medical and health, education, training, culture and entertainment, and leisure and travel," Ma added.

Next, China will move faster to open up healthcare, culture, education and telecommunication, among other sectors, and introduce a negative list for cross-border trade in services, Wang said. 

Institutional and structural arrangements for opening-up will be enhanced to unleash the huge potential of the China market, Wang added.