Assessing Benefits Of Trade Facilitation On Exports From China To Other SREB Countries

Titled as "Assessing benefits of trade facilitation on exports from China to other SREB countries",this thesis is intended to assess the trade facilitation level of Silk Road Economic Belt(SREB)countries and to analyze what influence the trade facilitation level of SREB countries imposes on the exports from China to other SREB countries,especially how different factors of trade facilitation affect the exports.Moreover,based on the empirical analysis result this thesis will give policy recommendations to make the most of trade facilitation so as to enhance the trade between China and other SREB countries.The topic of trade facilitation have acquired increasing policy and academic interests these years.This is partly because the tariffs of most countries has been reduced to a quite low level and the role of trade facilitation improvements in stimulating international trade is accordingly highlighted.In 2013 China put forward the strategy of building the "Silk Road Economic Belt",an economic cooperation zone for 50 countries from east,west,central and south Asia and east Europe.Trade facilitation promotion and cooperation is set as one of the core issues of the economic zone.This is the background under which this thesis rises.To do the research,this thesis introduces the research background and research question,methodology,significance and uniqueness of the study,reviews previous literatures on trade facilitation,delves into relevant theories,conducts the empirical study and explains the results,and finally puts forward conclusions of the study,gives policy recommendations and points out limitations of this thesis and the future directions.In the empirical study,this thesis adopts the gravity model and run the fixed effect model to do the analysis.The originality of this thesis mainly lies in the assessing index selection.In the empirical study,this thesis firstly defines an assessing index which contains four first grade indexes,namely technological readiness,transport infrastructure quality,customs environment,and regulatory environment,and thirteen second grade indexes to quantify the trade facilitation level.While previous studies adopts the index of transport infrastructure quality,this study goes further to differentiate between different modes of transport and develops three second grade indexes:quality of roads,quality of port infrastructure,and quality of air transport infrastructure.Hopefully this can help to get a more accurate data of the transport infrastructure level of object countries.Besides,when evaluating the regulatory environment level,instead of using the index of the "reliability of legal framework" which is adopted in the previous studies,this thesis uses the index of the "efficiency of legal framework in settling disputes".This index is more quantifiable,therefore the data is more convincing.The conclusion of this study is that improvements of technological readiness and regulatory environment will significantly affect the exports of China while customs environment and transport infrastructure quality are not significantly correlated to the exports.Moreover,Improvements of technological readiness imposes positive impacts on the export volume while improvement of regulatory environment imposes negative impacts on the export volume.