The Influence Of Cultural Distance On Chinese Export Trade Along With "The Belt And Road Initiative"

With the development of reform and opening up,China’s cultural and trade exchanges with countries around the world are growing quickly,foreign trade has also made significant progress,both trade volume and trade value are greatly increased,exports have gradually become an important force of China’s economic growth.With the Chinese goods sold around the world,the unique cultural symbols which contain have gradually been recognized by the people of the world,Chinese culture has become a beautiful Chinese business card.In September and October 2013,General Secretary Xi Jinping,during his visit to Central Asia and Southeast Asian countries,has proposed to build the "the Silk Road Economic Belt "and" the 21st-Century Maritime Silk Road" in order to strengthen the trade with neighboring countries and break the barriers of communication between Asia and Africa.Since 2013,China has invested more than$ 50 billion in this project,and in 2014 China announced the establishment of a total of $ 40 billion in the "Silk Road" fund.According to the published "The Belt and Road Initiative" blueprint,it will be a road for business,which connected to Europe,Asia and Africa "cultural and historical genes from the ancient Silk Road,and with Eurasia as main area ",the purpose is to strengthen along National infrastructure construction,promote trade and cultural exchanges,so that countries along the line have become the "new Silk Road" beneficiaries.Because "neighbourhood" all the way along the route 65,involving state population of about 4.4 billion,Buddhism,Islam and Christianity along the three major religions in the country have their own audience,cultural distance will be the important factors influencing the export trade.So how do you in a country of cultural differences so big groups more effective actively pushing forward the construction of the "area" makes all countries along can maximize export trade is a very important topic.Based on Anderson and van Wincoop’s theory to establish the microscopic significance of the extended gravity model as the foundation,by Baier and Bergstan proposed first order Taylor expansion approximation method to control the multilateral resistance.In building the core of this article when variable cultural distance indicators by introducing six Hofstede’s culture dimension theory,considering the heterogeneity of each index objectively using Mahalanobis distance to construct cultural distance indicators to measure the distance.Selected 1995-2015,our country and "The Belt and Road Initiative" all the way along the country’s exports data as explanatory variables,at the same time,on the basis of predecessors’research choose national GDP,geographic distance,cultural distance variables as well as the common language,common borders,APEC and WTO virtual variables as explanatory variables,through BVOLS method estimates be explained variable,get the effects of various variables on exports,especially to investigate the influence of cultural distance for export.Because of a huge number of kinds and volumes of Chinese exports,this paper in the first place in the national total level carries on the empirical research,and then according to the division standard of the world bank,the trading partners is divided into High-income countries,middle and higher income countries and low-and middle-income countries and empirical estimates with three subsample respectively,finally according to SITC classification standard,the export products is divided into 10 categories,and on this basis to do empirical analysis respectively.Empirical results show that for the whole export data,for export has a significant role in promoting cultural distance,"consumers diversify path" and"product differentiation advantage path" in China and "The Belt and Road Initiative"all the way along the country’s export trade plays a major role.For countries with different income levels,the positive impact of cultural distance on exports is very significant,especially for countries with higher income levels,which may because of the number of exports is largest between China and middle-and high-income countries.For SITC classification of different categories of products,the cultural distance is still significant for the increase of export effect,but also have obvious difference in the effect,it may with different categories of products contain cultural connotation is different,resulting in the consumer to the reactions of different categories of products is different too.