A Study On Import Demand Of The Countries Along The Maritime Silk Route

Nowadays, as an international cooperation initiative and new strategic consensus and ideas, " The Belt and Road Initiatives" is being put forword and initiatived by many countries in the world. China as one of the birthplace of Silk Road, in recent years, the economic and trade relations with the countries along "Maritime Silk Road" is gradually strengthened and constantly improved. Therefore, with the import demand in the global has undergone significant changes and the import demand in the countries along "The Belt and Road Initiatives" is growing rapidly, it is necessary to clear on the import demand conditions in the countries along "Maritime Silk Road" from the view of the changes of product import demand and its influencing factors, to explore the current situation of economic and trade cooperation, opportunities and space in cooperation between China and the countries along "Maritime Silk Road", then give policy recommendations for their trade cooperation, it’s not only has a certain necessity, but also has great practical significance.In this paper, the method of normative analysis and empirical analysis, quantitative analysis and qualitative analysis are used to generalize the changes of product import demand and its influencing factors of the countries along "Maritime Silk Road". In the study, this paper firstly elaborates the changes of product import demand of these countries, then divided them into three major regions to study, in the feature level and according to HS(1992) classification criteria, the imported products were divided into four categories,they are resource-intensive products, labor-intensive, capital-intensive products and technology-intensive products, use statistics and graph analysis the proportion of each products in the total import demand. Besides, also use the Moore index to measure the structure changes of import demand. This paper uses the panel model analysis to analyze the relationship between import demand of goods and the factors which influencing changes. Empirical results show that the level of economic factors, the development of export trade, inflation and foreign direct investment are active and useful to import demand, while the exchange rate, the size of population and the financial crisis hinder import demand. Finally, combining with the business relationship between China and the countries along "Maritime Silk Road", the paper puts forward some specific advice on how to stabilizing promote the space in cooperation between China and the countries along "Maritime Silk Road".