Empirical Research On The Impact Of Regional Trade Agreements On Knowledge Spillover

Since the 1990s, economic regionalization is becoming the dominant trend of economic globalization, the number of regional trade agreements (RTA) growth accelerated. In recent years, more and more scholars added to the study of trade agreements. However, the existing studies mostly focused on static effects of trade agreements, such as trade creation and trade diversion, research on the dynamic effects of trade agreements is little mentioned in the literature. Trade agreements between countries has become an important symbol of the dynamic changes in social relations, and its changing patterns of world trade and further impact on knowledge spillovers attrct more attention. This paper focuses on the impact of trade agreements on the mechanism of knowledge spillovers to speculate and verification.On the basis of previous studies, we analyzed the mechanism of knowledge spillover effects of trade agreement.Finding that the trade agreement by changing the distance between the national society to influence knowledge spillovers between them. We use social network analysis methods to study the trade agreements chich registered in WTO during 1991-2014, and by the density, the center and the edge of the core analysis in three dimensions to define the position of each country in the global network of regional trade agreements. We found that, due to the boom of trade agreements signed by the world of regional trade agreements, East Asia showed the European Union, North America and the emerging pattern of the three pillars of the network.In the empirical analysis, we use patent citation to track the trajectory of knowledge spillovers, using patent citation from 1991-2002 year to the panel data to build a gravity model. According to the characteristics of the data, we constructed a zero-inflated negative binomial model, two steps of knowledge spillover effects of trade agreements are to be validated, the results show that:(1) the higher in global and regional trade agreements which network protocol strength country, the higher the patent references between them, which is more obvious knowledge spillovers; (2) in the United States Patent and Trademark Office, among other countries, the more patent was awarded,the stronger knowledge spillovers between the countries. These two conclusions from two angles proved itself the knowledge level of the national innovation capacity and national status in the international trade network, affecting its ability to profit from the knowledge overflow. In addition, the study also found that the geographical distance to some extent hindered the knowledge spillovers between countries.