The Impact Of Trade Agreement Depth On Intermediate Product Trade

With the deepening of international division of labor and the upgrading of global value chain,intermediate goods trade plays a more and more important role,occupying a huge share in world goods trade.It is urgent for all countries in the world to eliminate trade barriers,reduce trade costs and create a trade facilitation environment so as to complete the international production of products.However,WTO,as the cornerstone of World Trade Governance,has been making slow progress in multilateral negotiations for a long time due to its internal mechanism and the universality and heterogeneity of its members'interests.In addition,with the increase of uncertainty factors in the current global economic situation,countries around the world are more and more willing to speed up the pace of foreign economic integration by signing regional trade agreements,so as to reduce trade costs and expand the scale of intermediate goods trade,so as to better participate in the global production network and accelerate the upgrading of domestic enterprises in the global value chain.For a long time,the Asia Pacific region has been the region with more active global economic development,and also the region with the most concentrated growth of regional trade agreements in recent years.Therefore,this paper takes APEC members,the major economies in the Asia Pacific region,as the research object to investigate the impact of the depth of trade agreements on intermediate goods trade.This paper combs the related theories of intermediate goods trade,clarifies the mechanism of the influence of the depth of trade agreement on intermediate goods trade,and takes it as the theoretical support of the whole paper.With reference to the previous research results,and to be improved and supplemented,a relatively complete set of evaluation indicators of the depth of trade agreements is constructed,and the intermediate goods trade measurement method adopted in this paper is defined.On this basis,the paper analyzes the characteristics of the number and depth of trade agreements,as well as the scale and structural characteristics of the development of intermediate goods trade.By comparing the whole world and the Asia Pacific region,it reflects the existing advantages and improvement space of the Asia Pacific region compared with the global average level in terms of the depth of trade agreements and the development of intermiediate goods trade.In order to draw objective and quantitative conclusions,this paper constructs an extended gravity model,selects APEC members as the research object,and uses the data from 1998 to 2017 to empirically test the impact of the depth of trade agreements on intermediate goods trade.The results show that the deep integration of trade agreements does effectively promote the intermediate goods trade among APEC members,thus enhancing their participation in the global value chain.In addition,this paper gets the following more detailed conclusions:first,the importance of different articles to intermediate goods trade is different,the effect of wto-x articles on intennediate goods trade is greater than that of WTO+articles;the effect of tariff articles is more obvious than that of non-tariff articles.Second,different types of intermediate products are affected by the depth of trade agreements to different degrees.Primary intermediate products are more affected by the core provisions than processed intermediate products.Third,in the study of the impact of the depth of trade agreements on intermediate goods trade,"North North" trade agreements,"North South" trade agreements,"south north" trade agreements and "south south" trade agreements have certain heterogeneity on the impact of intermediate goods trade,and the strengthening of the integration of trade agreements has a significant role in promoting intermediate goods trade with the participation of developed countries.When one of the parties of the trade agreement is a developed country,the effect of wto-x on the trade of intermediate goods is more obvious,while when both parties of the trade agreement are developing countries,the effect of WTO+is more obvious;when one of the parties of the trade agreement is a developing country,the effect of tariff clauses on the trade of intermediate goods is more obvious,while when both parties of the trade agreement are developing countries,the effect of tariff clauses on the trade of intermediate goods is more obvious.When they are all developed countries,the role of non-tariff clauses is slightly obvious.Compared with the previous studies,the innovations of this paper are as follows:first,this paper selects APEC members as the representatives of the major economies in the Asia Pacific region,and selects a 20-year time span to comprehensively and representatively study the intermediate goods trade effect of trade agreements in the Asia Pacific region.Second,this paper has some innovations in the measurement indicators of existing trade agreements.Instead of using a single indicator,it constructs six indicators from two aspects of coverage and binding force,and compares the regression results to select the core articles that have a greater impact on intermediate goods trade.Thirdly,this paper classifies the intermediate products from different perspectives,differentiates the economic development level of the parties to the trade agreement,makes regression by samples,and gives more detailed conclusions than the existing literature.