Study On The Influence Of Cultural Differences On Export Trade Between China And Countries Along The Belt And Road

Today,the world economic situation is complex and the trend against globalization is obvious.The impact of the world financial crisis has not yet been completely eliminated.Because of that,the global economy has recovered slowly and the patterns of international investment and trade has undergone profound changes.Trade frictions between China and the United States continue and all the countries are still facing severe development problems.In order to solve the problem of economic transformation and stimulate the global economic recovery,Xi Jinping put forward the "Belt and Road Initiative" on the basis of the ancient Silk Road in 2013.He stressed that countries along the route should build a "community of interests" and a "community of destiny" in order to accelerate the recovery of the world economy and close economic and trade cooperation among countries.With the deepening of the initiative,China’s trade exchanges with countries along the Belt and Road route are getting closer and closer.According to data released by the Ministry of Commerce of China,the total volume of goods trade between China and countries along the Belt and Road route from 2013 to 2017 soared to 5 trillion dollars with an increase rate exceeding 3.6 percent of China’s overall foreign trade.In 2017,the total import and export volume between China and countries along the "Belt and Road Initiative" route reached 1.44032 trillion dollars,accounting for 36.2 percent of China’s total import and export trade.Of this total,exports totaled 774.26 billion dollars,accounting for 34.2 percent of China’s total exports.Due to complex international forms and the disappearance of domestic demographic dividend,the growth of China’s foreign exports has been slowed down or even become negative in recent years which caused that the driving force of export-driven economic growth is insufficient.Therefore,it is an urgent problem to actively explore the potential markets of countries along the "Belt and Road Initiative"route and to find new growth points for export trade.However,as we all know,there are many countries along the "Belt and Road Initiative" route.Seventy-one countries have participated in the construction,covering about 3.44 billion people.Religious beliefs and language barriers are obvious.The complex cultural background has posed great challenges to the development of international trade.Under the background of the continuous improvement of infrastructure construction and the continuous development of information technology,cultural defference,as an invisible factor,plays a very important role in international trade.Therefore,taking the cultural distance as the quantitative index,this paper focuses on the analysis of the influence of cultural differences on the export trade between China and the countries along "Belt and Road Initiative",in order to provide policy suggestions for promoting China’s export trade with "Belt and Road Initiative"countries and optimizing the trade structure from the perspective of cultural differences.This article mainly includes the following parts:The first chapter is an introduction.First of all,the research background and the theoretical and practical significance of this paper are described in detail,then the relevant documents are sorted and classified,and the research ideas and research methods of this paper are presented in a simple and clear manner,and the innovation and deficiency of this paper are indicated.The second chapter is related to the concept and the theoretical basis.First,the connotation of the relevant concepts,such as the cultural difference and the cultural distance,are clarified.Then the influence mechanism of the cultural difference on the trade is analyzed in detail through the elaboration of the related theories such as transaction cost and so on.And the theoretical foundation is laid for the view of this paper.The third chapter analyses the current trade situation between China and countries along the "One Belt and One Road" in 1995-2017.Based on Hofstad’s theory of national cultural dimension,the improved KSI method is used to measure the cultural distance,which provides data for empirical analysis The fourth chapter is the empirical analysis.Firstly,this paper introduces the explanatory variables and their meanings involved in the empirical analysis,and extends the gravity model.And finally it draws the conclusion that cultural distance has a significant inhibitory effect on export trade,and then the paper further explores the influence of cultural distance on primary products and manufactured products.The fifth chapter is the conclusion and policy recommendation.Based on the previous study,the following conclusions are drawn:the economic scale and geographical distance of the two sides of the trade,the dependence of foreign trade,the total population and cultural distance are all the important factors that affect China’s export trade to countries along Belt and Road Initiative.According to the conclusion of the study,this paper puts forward that China should promote the rapid development of China’s export trade and promote the optimization of trade structure by promoting cultural blending,building cultural brands and formulating targeted trade policies according to different situations.This paper mainly has three innovations:first,this paper takes cultural distance as an index to quantify cultural differences and quantitatively analyzes the role of cultural differences in China’s export trade activities to countries along the "Belt and Road Initiative" route.Although the research results on the influencing factors of trade between China and the countries along Belt and Road Initiative are rich,they rarely start from the point of view of cultural differences.Secondly,starting from different cultural dimensions,this paper analyzes the influence of cultural differences on export trade in a single dimension,which is helpful to deepen the understanding of cultural differences among enterprises so as to formulate targeted strategies for promoting export trade.Third,the data is relatively new and real-time.This paper is based on the latest data for the period 1995-2017 and provides strong operational policy recommendations for expanding China’s export trade to countries along the Belt and Road.