Research On The Determinants Of Trade Quality And The Relationship Between The Quality And The Growth Of Trade

Under the background of global economic integration,the economic ties between countries get much more closer.Since 2011,the trade develops not so well as before,how to maintain its growth becomes a hot topic.Since the 18 th CPC National Congress,China proposed to transit from a country with �large� exports and imports to �strong� one,and regards trade quality improving as the entry point of promoting the structural reform on supply side in the13 th Five-Year Plan.The issue of trade quality and trade growth has become one of the important problems for current world.Which countries trade goods of high quality,and which countries trade low-quality ones? What about China,does it rank high in the world? which factors does the quality of the trade depend on? Whether improving the quality of trade can promote the growth of trade or not? It does have very important practical significance to investigate these problems.In this paper,we study the current global quality pattern based on the quality database of Christian,Chris,Nicola(2013,2015).First of all,we compared 112 countries' overall quality level during the period of 2000-2010,and found that the higher the income level of the country,the higher also is its overall quality level of trade.And China ranks the middle of all these countries,with a huge gap compared to the quality frontier;We then selected 42 representative developed countries,developing countries and the least developed countries,recalculate their quality index of twelve ISIC industry respectively,and find quality level of developed countries is significantly higher than that of other countries,especially in middle high technology and high manufacturing,developed ranks more forward.For China,the longitudinal industrial comparison shows that China get a relative high trade quality level in labor-intensive industries and technology-intensive industries;while horizontally compared to the quality frontier,China's relative quality competitiveness less weak in some technology-intensive industries.Secondly,we use panel data to find out the determinant factors of trade quality both in national level and industrial level;Four variables-Economic development,technological innovation,market demand and tariff level are selected for the empirical analysis in national level,while trade structure is added into the model for industrial ones;We use fixed effect model to calculate the influences of different variables on quality.Empirical results show that the enhancing effect of economic level on quality increases as the economic level improves,technological innovation plays a significant role in promoting trade quality for country group of middle high and high income,while for middle low and low country groups this effect is not significant,in general market demand has a positive impact on the quality,and as for tariff level,its reduction has little effect on the quality of high-income countries,while for other countries it does have a significant promoting effect.The key factors affecting the trade quality in industrial level are different.In general,technological innovation,tariff reduction and the upgrading of trade structure will promote the improvement of the quality of trade.Finally,this paper uses economic growth,market demand,cost advantage,international investment,trade openness and the exchange rate to test the relationship between trade quality and trade growth.The empirical result of total sample shows that quality upgrade can indeed promote the growth of trade;While the sub sample empirical results tells that for low-income and low-quality countries,quality upgrading will inhibit the growth of export,and plays a positive role for middle-low,middle-high and high ones.And as the income level and quality level develops,the promoting effect of quality upgrading for trade growth is larger.