Abstract: At present, the manufacturing industry chain is gradually shifting from manufacturing to service. The paper uses the forward decomposition method based on trade in value-added to exclude the foreign elements in the export products and then measure the real export scale of each industry in each country. Then the paper construct s export economy complexity index of the manufacturing and service industries based on this real scale, and uses the multinational panel data to empirically investigate the impact of export economic complexity on economic growth. The result shows that the higher the level of export economic complexity, the more obvious the promotion effect on economic growth. The conclusion is robust after controlling other variables. The development of China′s service trade is lagging behind, and the mode of foreign trade needs to be upgraded. When trading with others, China should gradually shift from pursuing the “quantity” to “quality”, improve the openness of service trade, enhance the service export capacity, expand the scale of service trade, and optimize the service trade export structure. The optimization of export structure will promote the coordinated development of both service and goods trade and eventually enhance the overall quality level of domestic export products.

Key words: global value chain, export economy complexity, economic growth, trade in value-added