An Empirical Study On The Trade Effects Of Regional Trade Agreements Going Beyond The WTO Trade Rules

The rules of Trade and Investment in the 21 st century have increasingly been far beyond the content of traditional tariff reduction of WTO,beginning to involve many non-tariff areas such as environmental policies,intellectual property rights,labor standards,e-commerce,government purchase and competition policy and product standards.The application of non-tariff measures in the field of international trade has a long history.As early as the 1970 s,non-tariff measures have become a key policy tool for countries to protect their trade.After decades of development,non-tariff measures have surpassed tariff measures,becoming one of the main methods for countries to carry out trade protection and trade strategic layout.Non-tariff measures are the most important trade barrier in international trade today.Although the WTO-led multilateral trading system is working hard to promote the standardized and coordinated development of non-tariff measures,little progress has been made.Instead,the regional trade agreement(RTA),which is based on bilateral negotiations,has become a carrier for countries to coordinate and liberalize non-tariff measures.With the continuous development of international trade,the focus of RTA negotiations has gradually shifted from tariff reductions only to both tariff reductions and removal of non-tariff barriers(NTBs).At the same time,the scope of non-tariff measures get into negotiated has become wider and wider,and China's participation in the wave of free trade zone construction is also following this trend.With the increasing attention of non-tariff measures in RTA content,it becomes more and more important to define the impact of non-tariff clauses on trade flows within the agreement.However,the domestic academic researchers' studies on China's Free Trade Agreement(FTA)and non-tariff measures stays at the overall level,focusing on the overall trade effect of FTA on China's international trade,or the trade impact of certain types of non-tariff measures on China's trade or on specific industries.This paper compares the tariff and non-tariff clauses under China's FTA,and empirically analyzing the trade creation effects of these two kinds of clauses by using bilateral trade data covering the Harmonized System 2-digit level of product varieties from China and 38 countries over 2002-2016,Dividing the trade effects generated by FTA into tariff effects and non-tariff effects,and further analyzing the heterogeneous effects of this two impacts on China's developed and developing trading partners.And finally,from the product level,a more detailed analysis of this two impacts on bilateral trade in labor-intensive,resource-intensive,and technology-intensive products has been conducted.The main findings are as follows.China's FTA has a significant overall trade creation effect and the partner countries benefit more;both tariff and non-tariff measures have significant trade creation effects;trade effects of tariff and non-tariff measures differ according to the income levels of partner countries: tariff reductions further promote bilateral trade between China and developing countries,non-tariff measures are more conducive to China's exports to developed countries and imports from developing countries;both tariff and non-tariff measures can promote the trade of labor-,resources-,and technology-intensive products,with tariff reduction further promoting bilateral trade in technology-and resource-intensive products and non-tariff measures more conducive to China's export of technology-intensive products.The research findings offer a decision-making reference for China to participate more actively in high-level FTA negotiations.