Sino-Thailand Bilateral Trade in Agricultural Products Competition and Complement.

China and Thailand are traditional agricultural countries, geographically near to each other, large differences in natural conditions and climates, agricultural trade between the two countries is pretty developed. In recent years, with a higher productivity and a more sophisticated opening-up policy, Sino-Thailand bilateral trade in agricultural products has kept steadily growing. However, there are still many problems such as a great similarity in exports, concentration of export market, low price competition and so on. Based on the international market position, trade structure of agricultural products, trade geography direction and others, using the latest product similarity index, market similarity index, trade complement index to analyze the competition and complement of agricultural products between China and Thailand in the international agricultural trade, also analyze the bilateral relations between the two countries in agricultural trade. Conclusions show that the trade complement does exist in agricultural product trade between China and Thailand, the market similarity is greater than the product similarity in agricultural product trade between China and Thailand. In the world agricultural product market, Thailand maintains its competitive advantage over China in general terms. However, Thai agricultural products much differ from those of China which lead to a low competition of farm products between China and Thailand in the global market. Conversely, in Sino-Thailand bilateral agricultural trade, competition plays the major role while complement, a minor one. This paper gives out some suggestions based on the analysis of several factors affecting the Sino-Thai trade in agricultural products. For example, make full use of comparative advantages; carry on strategic adjustment and others. This promotion of stable development of Sino-Thai trade in agricultural products is of great practical significance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]