Abstract: In the context of China’s domestic labor, capital, land, environment and other factor costs keeping rising and the international market demands keeping down-turning, to further improve and upgrade the quality of export products is the driving force for further growth of China’s export trade. This paper makes use of the import and export trade data during the period of 2001-2013 to test the relationship between the quality of China’s export products and the market share of the export products in the trade partner countries. The test results show that the upgrading of export product quality has significantly promoted the rising of the market share of China’s export products in the trade partner countries. The upgrading of export product quality presents nonlinear effect in promoting the international competitiveness of export products, i.e., the upgrading of export product quality results in decreasing returns when promoting the market share of the export products in the trade partner countries. The competitive effect against the vertical high quality trade products of the developed countries is bigger than that of the developed countries.

Key words: quality of export products; product quality index; market share; vertical high quality trade