Determinants Of Free Trade Agreements Based On The Multilateral Trading Agenda

Recent years,multilateral negotiations based on WTO are almost stagnant while Free Trade Agreement(FTA)began to play as a new platform for regional cooperation among countries and favored by great powers.TPP,RCEP and China-Japan-South Korea FTA emerged several years ago,and behind the emergence are adjustments of the international trade structure among big countries in all over the world.As a developing country and a rising country,China has accelerated the implementation of the FTA strategy,which plays as an important part of the new opening up policy.In this context,the determinants of FTAs are studied in depth,and the impact of the two typical countries' FTA main network("NAFTA" and "China-Japan-Korea FTA")is compared based on the context of multilateral processes.Literatures that supplied by scholars were commonly focused on the relationship between bilateral and multilateral negotiations and usually analyzed on theoretical level.Studies from the perspective of FTA network relationship are very rare and there are less empirical tests in terms of how multilateral agenda influence regional or bilateral FTA formations.Based on this text,the paper discusses the related mechanism of "Own-FTA effect" and "Cross-FTA effect" from the perspective of FTA network relationship,in terms of how they influence the willingness of constructing a new FTA.And then,compare the differences between two kinds of big countries.The paper has promoted the classic gravitational model and took three important time points into consideration to study the impacts of the multilateral process:chose year 2001 which represents the start of the multilateral negotiation,chose year 2004 to represent the smooth negotiations and year 2007 to analyze the stagnation of multilateral process.And the compare the three time nodes to drag out the differences in terms of their impacts on FTA formation.The empirical results are as follows:the start of multilateral negotiation tends to reduce countries' willingness to construct FTAs significantly,which has signs to rise again when multilateral negotiations go smoothly but to reduce further when multilateral negations are impeded;as for the comparison about leading countries and rising countries through choosing their important FTA networks,the author found that differences do exist between the two typical countries in terms of the determinants of FTA formation.In particular,leading countries can advance FTA-formation through strengthening both the"Own-FTA effect "and the "Cross-FTA effect",while the rising countries tend to weaken the two FTA effects and then restrain the FTA-formation;Leading countries can lower the negative impact from multilateral negotiations.The rising countries can weaken the positive impact of successful multilateral negotiations on FTA-formation and intensify the negative impact of sluggish multilateral negotiations on FTA-formation.Based on the theory and the empirical results,the paper has provided some ideas and suggestions to help China to accomplish its FTA strategy in the new period,for example,grasp the opportunity to construct FTAs with surrounding countries,bring about a resumption of China-Japan-Korea FTA,and make an effort to seek FTA partners all over the world.