Study On The Influence Of Trade Facilitation Factors On The Trade Cost Of Agricultural Products Between China And ASEAN

At present,ASEAN has become China’s largest trading partner.As important agricultural countries,asean countries’ agricultural trade is an integral part of china-asean trade,and trade cost is an important factor hindering trade flow.Although the China-Asean Free Trade Area was established in 2010,during which most agricultural products from both sides are tariff-free,the cost of agricultural trade between China and ASEAN remains high.At present,the cost of bilateral trade has changed from explicit tariff barriers to various hidden non-tariff barriers.For Both Sides of China and ASEAN,it is particularly necessary to reduce the cost of agricultural trade,which requires the analysis of bilateral agricultural trade cost level and its influencing factors,and find out the mechanism to reduce the cost of trade.The purpose of trade facilitation is to simplify and coordinate trade procedures and speed up the cross-border flow of factors.It involves a wide range of links,including customs and cross-border regimes,transport,licensing,quarantine,electronic data transmission,payment,insurance and other financial requirements.The level of trade facilitation can directly affect the search cost,contract cost,performance cost,transportation cost,cross-border cost and distribution cost of agricultural trade.In fact,trade facilitation and non-tariff barriers are two sides of the same body.The higher the level of trade facilitation,the lower the corresponding non-tariff barriers will be.Current studies lack systematic classification of the influencing factors of trade cost and simply divide the influencing factors into natural factors,infrastructure factors,economic scale factors,etc.The index induction is not comprehensive,and the index selection is mainly based on the direct selection of specific variables,lacking the construction of comprehensive index measurement system.For example,in the selection of trade facilitation level,researchers tend to select proxy indicators such as foreign trade dependence,economic freedom and infrastructure level to measure the impact of trade facilitation level on trade cost.In fact,these factors are only a part of trade facilitation and the indicators are not considered comprehensively.Reference related literature,this paper builds trade facilitation measure index evaluation system,a quantitative measure of the asean countries in 2006-2018 level of trade facilitation,the results show that the asean trade facilitation level difference obvious,in addition to Singapore country belong to the trade facilitation,belongs to the general convenience in Malaysia,the rest are not convenient.In the empirical analysis,this paper takes the trade facilitation level of ASEAN countries as the core explanatory variable to measure its impact on the trade cost of china-asean agricultural products,and the results show that the trade facilitation level effectively reduces the trade cost of agricultural products of both sides.The sub-index regression results show that among the four first-level indicators of trade facilitation,transportation infrastructure level and e-commerce level significantly reduce the cost of china-asean agricultural trade,while customs efficiency and institutional environment have no significant impact on it.The analysis of mediating effect shows that the level of trade facilitation affects the trade cost and then indirectly affects the trade volume in china-asean agricultural trade.In this mechanism,compared with the direct effect of trade facilitation on trade volume,the mediating effect of trade facilitation level through trade cost accounts for about half.Finally,this paper gives the specific suggestions to reduce the cost of bilateral agricultural trade and promote the development of agricultural trade.