Influence Factors Study On China’s Cultural Trade

With the arrival of the knowledge economy era, culture has become a moreimportant engine to promote the development of economy. Therefore, more and morecountries regard cultural trade as a strategic trade, playing a powerful role in thedevelopment of economy and society. UNESCO statistics report points out thatChina’s cultural trade develop well, for it has maintained a trade surplus advantagesince the1990s, which is a special case of the development of cultural trade, as adeveloping country. However, most of the domestic scholar’s research shows thatChina has serious cultural trade deficit. Therefore, we need to research and analyzereal situation of China’s cultural trade in-depth, and further explore key factorsaffecting the promotion of cultural trade.In this paper, on the basis of a large number of paper to define the concept andclassification of cultural trade, cultural heritage, recording media, books andnewspapers, visual arts, and audio-visual media form the core part of the culturalproducts. This paper adopts the UN Comtrade database HS07taxonomy, selecting thedata of2007-2013of all kinds of cultural products trade in China, and analyzes thecurrent situation of China’s cultural trade from the size, structure and layout of thetrade in detail. Result shows that although China’s cultural trade develops fast and theoverall cultural products and the core cultural products trade are characterized bysurplus, the trade structure and trade distribution is unbalanced. The proportion ofimports and exports is highly discordant, mainly depending on export and the relatedcultural products trade proportion is too large. The classified core cultural productsexport relies mainly on the media and audio-visual media video game products whichhas relatively less cultural content. The proportion of books, newspapers with textsymbols and culture connotation, the visual arts and film products of audio-visualmedia is not large in the total core cultural products exports. And the cultural heritageof the ratio is even less than1%. Therefore the trade surplus is almost the surplus ofgoods trade. Core cultural products’ import and export are highly concentrated, and high income countries is still the major cultural trade partners of China."Culturalkinship" has different performance with import and export.In order to explore the influencing elements of Chinese cultural products tradedevelopment, this paper analyzes the per capita GDP of China and the tradingcountries, geographical distance, cultural distance, the level of information, whetherto have the same trade agreement and common language as the explained variable,and adjust the trade gravity model by fully considering the effect of networkexternality of cultural products consumption on trade flows.By using dynamic panel data and GMM regression analysis，the paper exploresthe entirety and the classifications of the core cultural products to study the maininfluence factors of China’s cultural trade. The results show that: the effect of thefactors on import and export of the core cultural products varies, particularly in thearea of cultural distance, information level, whether sharing the same trade agreementand whether using a common language. Secondly, the special words and language thatChina’s cultural products contain are not popularized globally, the cost to study is highand the laking of Intellectual property right protection make information level have anegative correlation with the export of cultural products. But, there is no significantrelationship between information level and the import of cultural products. Culturaldifferences promote the export of cultural products, while block imports. TheNetwork effect of the consumption of cultural products will expand the import andexport of China’s cultural products by knowledge spillover, cultural spillover etc.Third, The explanatory variable have different influence on Cultural heritage, RecordMedium, Books and Newspapers, Visual Arts and Visual media. Even when in thetrade flow, the explanatory variable may have the opposite effect according to thedifferent classified core cultural products. Besides, the same explanatory variable mayproduce different effects when explaining import and export.Based on the results of the above research, according to the basic conclusion, thepaper targetedly put forward some suggestions to promote the development ofChinese cultural trade, especially the core cultural products trade, in order to improvethe level of global competitiveness of China’s cultural trade, to better realize the "going out" of Chinese culture, carry forward the Chinese traditional culturethroughout the world.