Research On The Impact Of International Students In China On The Development Of Urban Export Trad

Since its accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001,China’s foreign trade has entered a “leapfrog development stage”,with the total volume of trade expanding continuously,and has now become the world’s largest trading country.China’s total export trade increased from 4743 billion dollars in 2001 to 60503 billion dollars in 2021.For two decades,China’s exports have increased more than 13 times,and export trade plays an irreplaceable driving role in China’s economic growth.However,with China’s active integration into the global trade market,the ever-exaggerated trade surplus is accompanied by problems such as uneven product quality and imbalanced trade structure,and the shortage of international talent pool has gradually emerged.International students coming to China represent a positive human capital externality,they are very familiar with overseas markets and have a certain understanding of Chinese culture,their international vision and strong cross-cultural communication skills can serve as a link between Chinese companies and overseas markets,and the diverse knowledge and skills they master can burst out new ideas in the exchange and cooperation with local talents,with their unique advantages.They can promote China’s export trade to “increase quantity and quality”.Therefore,attracting international students coming to China is an effective way to promote the transformation and upgrading of China’s export trade,and exploring the influence mechanism of international students on China’s export trade “increasing quantity and quality” has become a research topic with practical significance.In order to comprehensively analyze the effect of international students coming to China on the export trade of each city in China,this study is carried out in the following three parts:(1)Basic research.Based on the collected data of international students in China and export trade,this study analyzes the dynamic evolution of the scale,spatial pattern and educational structure of international students in China,the total volume law,spatial pattern and product structure of export trade,and preliminarily analyzes the correlation between the two through the characteristic facts;(2)Research on the effect of international students on the scale of export trade of cities in China.Based on the panel data constructed for 315 cities from 2003 to 2018,a Pooled Ordinary Least Squares model(POLS)is applied to explore whether and how international students can have an impact on the export trade scale of China’s cities,and the dynamic effect of the role of international students in enhancing the export trade scale of China’s cities is analyzed through lagged-effects regression;(3)Research on the effect of international students on the quality of export trade of cities in China.Taking 112 cities from 2003 to 2016 as research samples and introducing the concept of export sophistication,a POLS model is constructed to investigate whether international students can enhance the export sophistication of export products through human capital externality effect and technology spillover effect.In addition,a threshold regression model is introduced to test the effectiveness of the impact of international students on the export trade quality of Chinese cities,in order to improve the research framework of the export promotion effect of international students proposed in this paper in a closer way.The study found that:(1)International students coming to China can promote the expansion of export trade scale in Chinese cities,which still holds after a series of robustness tests.International students can effectively promote the expansion of export trade within 4 years of their arrival in China,and the promotion effect on export scale reaches the maximum when international students coming to China after 2 years.(2)International students coming to China can promote the quality of export trade of the city in China.When the city has better transportation infrastructure or higher innovation ability,the role of international students coming to China in improving the quality of export trade will be further increased.The heterogeneity analysis shows that the effect of academic and non-scholarship international students on the export trade quality of Chinese cities is more obvious;the effect of international students on the export trade quality of cities with double-class universities is higher than that of cities without double-class universities;Further research finds that there is a “threshold effect” on the effect of international students on the export trade quality of cities.Based on the above findings,this study puts forward policy implications from the perspectives of talent introduction policy,education market opening,improving the quality of education in China,in order to provide references for the development of China’s education for students coming to China as well as export trade.