China's total trade in services increased by 3% year on year in the first August

The Ministry of Commerce today released data on China's trade in services from January to August. The growth rate of China's export of services has further increased, the trade deficit in services has been reduced, and knowledge-intensive trade in services has shown a prominent performance. The data show that the total volume of China's trade in services reached 357.28 billion yuan from January to August, an increase of 3% over the same period of last year. Among them, exports amounted to 1264.56 billion yuan, an increase of 9.7%, while imports amounted to 230.75 billion yuan, a decrease of 0.3%. The growth rate of service exports increased further. In August, the export of services grew by 11.5%, faster than the previous seven months, which further accelerated the growth of export of services in January-August, indicating that the competitiveness of our export of services continued to improve; the proportion of export of services in import and export of services was 35.4%, which was 2.1 percentage points higher than that of the same period last year. In particular, the accelerated development of information transmission, software and information technology services, leasing and business services and the continuous improvement of the overall development environment of trade in services have promoted the rapid growth of high-end productive services exports, such as intellectual property royalties and other commercial services.

The trade deficit in services decreased. From January to August, the growth rate of China's service exports was 10 percentage points higher than that of imports, and the service trade deficit dropped by 10.1%, which was further increased than that of the previous seven months. The deficit dropped to 1042.96 billion yuan, a decrease of 117.47 billion yuan over the same period last year. Knowledge-intensive trade in services is outstanding. From January to August, China's import and export of Knowledge-intensive Services reached 1214.17 billion yuan, an increase of 10.6%, higher than the overall growth rate of import and export of services by 7.6 percentage points, accounting for 34% of the total import and export of services, an increase of 2.3 percentage points over the same period last year. Among them, exports of Knowledge-intensive Services increased by 13.5% to 638.7 billion yuan, while imports increased by 7.6% to 575.47 billion yuan. In specific areas, personal cultural and entertainment services, telecommunications, computer and information services, financial services and other services grew rapidly, with import and export growth reaching 23%, 19.7% and 15.2% respectively.