Influencing Factors And Threshold Effect Of Trade In Cultural Goods In China Under The Framework Of Cultural System

Since1990s, the substantial growth of cultural industries has run parallel to expanding international trade in cultural goods and services. Between1992and2009, the total amount of trade in cultural goods has increased from US$175.5billion to527.3billion, which the total amount of trade in core cultural goods has increased by nearly four times. However, on one hand, the high-income economies are the largest producers and consumers of cultural goods, such as United States, Germany, South Korea and Japan, while the developing countries accounted for less than1%. On the other hand, since the21st century, more and more domestic scholars have focused on this field and pointed out that China had a serious trade deficit in culture trade, especially for the motion picture and publishing industry. However, reports of UNESCO have pointed out that China was an exception to the developing countries. The trade in cultural goods in China have become surplus since early1990s, and the export of its core cultural goods have got the third place in the world. So, what’s the real status quo of China?Base on previous Literature, this paper use the data between1992and2009in UN Comtrade database to analysis the status quo of culture trade, which shows that, firstly, The trade in cultural goods in China has a strong comparative advantage globally, the trade in overall/related and the core cultural goods are all surplus. Secondly, there have imbalance in trade in cultural goods. The overall surplus depends on the export of related cultural products, as well as the visual arts and audio-visual products in the core culture, and the export volume of the other core cultures which contains more cultural contents, such as Heritage goods and printed matters, was very small, even worse, the trade in music and performing arts were deficit in some years. Thirdly, there also have geographical imbalances in the distribution, besides Hong Kong, OECD countries were the main market. In particular, in order to join WTO, China’s released the control of market access policy on cultural products and services, which makes the trade in cultural goods in China gradually out of protection. In order to explore the influencing factors and their impact on cultural trade, we firstly improved WBI/KSI/EDI, the three calculation methods to measure the cultural distance and culture map between China and the OECD countries, which pointed out that South Korea and Japan were the closer countries, and Canada, the United States, and Sweden were the farther ones. Secondly, we chose immigrants, cultural distance and the interaction term as the main explanatory variables, and then we revealed RCA, CTI, and TAR index to the expanded gravity model as our theoretical model of trade in cultural goods and did the theoretical analysis.On this basis of theoretical analysis, this thesis empirically studied the effect of influencing factors to the trade in cultural goods between China and OECD countries. According to the panel data from1992to2009, we firstly used Stata10.0software to do FGLS robust estimation for the exports of overall cultural products, cultural products, as well as the core of cultural products. And we pointed that, immigration was significantly negative and cultural distance was significantly positive with the entire three explained variable, where the difference is, for the former, cultural distance could offset the effects of the immigration, so the interaction term was significantly positive, while for the latter two, there was no offset effect. Then, for the exports of the five categories of the trade in core cultural goods, immigration had export-intensification effect for Music Performing Arts and Cultural Heritage, and cultural distance had export-intensification effect for Printed Matters and Audio-Visual Arts, however, both the immigration and cultural distance had significantly export inhibitory effect. At last, in order to further test different impact of cultural distance on core cultural goods, this paper introduced the cultural distance, immigration and geographical distance as the threshold variables to do the threshold test and make the threshold effect analysis. We pointed that, the effect of cultural distance on all kinds of cultural goods depended on the degree of the three threshold variable.On the above basis, this thesis finally revealed the main conclusions, and put forward some suggestions from three angles of industrial structure, trade structure, and immigration and cultural trade policy, in order to enhance the overall competitiveness of the cultural and creative industries, promote the level of trade in core cultural goods, and carry forward the Chinese traditional culture world widely.