Measurement Of Trade Facilitation Level Between China And Major African Countries And Study On Its Impact On Exports

With the proposal of the eight major initiatives of the 2018 Beijing summit of the forum on China-Africa cooperation,China and Africa will work together to implement the eight major initiatives of China-Africa cooperation,including trade facilitation.Trade is the initial form of China-Africa economic and trade cooperation.With the development of China-Africa relations and the increase of exchanges,the scale of China-Africa trade is expanding day by day.However,various trade barriers still restrict the smooth flow of bilateral trade,and there is much room for trade facilitation.It is of positive practical significance to study the level of trade facilitation between China and African countries and its impact on the volume of trade for improving the trade environment and expanding the trade scale between China and African countries.On the basis of summarizing relevant research literature on trade facilitation and combining with relevant trade facilitation theories,this paper mainly discusses the following aspects: Firstly,this paper reviews the trade situation between China and Africa from 2008 to 2018 and analyzes its trade characteristics.Secondly,after summarizing domestic and foreign scholars on the basis of the study of trade facilitation,built a comprehensive evaluation index system of trade facilitation which contains 4 first-level indicators(infrastructure quality,customs environment,regulation environment and finance and e-commerce)and 15 secondary index,and then adopt principal component analysis(PCA)to measurement trade facilitation of China and six major African countries.In addition,the trade facilitation levels of China and six major African countries were compared from a horizontal and vertical perspective to understand the dynamic changes and gaps in the trade facilitation levels of each country.Then it makes a detailed comparative analysis of 15 secondary indicators of China and 6 major African countries,trying to make a more thorough analysis of the specific factors affecting the level of trade facilitation.After comprehensively measuring the level of trade facilitation in China and six major African countries,China was taken as the exporter,the level of trade facilitation in the importing country and four first-level indicators were added into the gravity model respectively,and its impact on the export volume of the exporting country was calculated.The conclusion is that trade facilitation has a great impact on the export volume.For every 1% increase(decrease)in the level of trade facilitation in the importing country,China's exports to the importing country increase(decrease)2.038%.Among the four first-level indicators,the customs environment has the greatest impact on the export,followed by the finance and e-commerce and infrastructure quality,while the regulatory environment has the least impact.Finally,based on the above analysis,this paper puts forward some policy suggestions to further promote the trade between China and Africa from the perspective of improving trade facilitation.