Positive Analysis of Potential in China's Cotton Import

摘要

Since 2003, China has been the largest importer of cotton in the world. Generally, China's cotton import has relatively high market centralization at present with the cotton imported from top three trading partners taking up 74.94% of the total import of cotton. This paper constructed an improved gravity model of trade and analyzed the development potential of China's cotton import by utilizing the panel data during 1992-2016 of top forty trading partners. Results of the empirical study show that the cotton imported to China from fourteen countries including Switzerland, Nigeria, Bengal, Indonesia, Turkey and Australia is at the stage of excessive import"; the cotton imported to China from eleven countries including Cameroon, Egypt, Togo, Chad, Mali and India is at the stage of "import saturation", so there is limited space for the import of cotton from those countries; the cotton imported to China from fifteen countries including Cote d'Ivoire, Zambia, Malaysia, Tajikistan and Brazil is at the stage of "insufficient import". Besides, China shall preferentially import cotton from Turkmenistan, Iran and Malaysia which offer relatively lower export price and increase imports from Brazil and Greece these two major cotton producers and exporters.