The Impact Of Regional Trade Agreements On Service Trade:From The Perspective Of Financial Development Differences

As the most important link in China’s foreign trade,the signing of regional trade agreements plays a crucial role in promoting the construction of a high standard free trade network for China to better face the world.By signing regional trade agreements,both sides can reduce the cost of service trade by relaxing industry entry conditions,thereby promoting the development of bilateral service trade;Secondly,regional trade agreements can create a "ripple effect" between upstream and downstream sectors through vertical industry linkages,reducing the cost of goods trade while stimulating the development of service trade;Finally,regional trade agreements can help improve the business environment,reduce policy uncertainty,and improve the quality and quantity of service trade exports.Moreover,the financial development gap of a country can promote regional service trade imports by alleviating corporate financing constraints and achieving regional economic growth;At the same time,the financial development differences of a country can provide financing support for high-quality export enterprises through policy guidance,improve market resource allocation efficiency,and help export enterprises innovate and develop,improve international competitiveness,and ultimately expand service trade exports.In order to explore the relationship between regional trade agreements and service trade and the impact path of financial development differences on their relationship,this paper focuses on the signing of regional trade agreements between other countries and China,builds an evaluation system for the depth of regional trade agreements,and selects national panel data of 15 countries and regions that have signed regional trade agreements with China from 2005 to 2020,The GMM model is used to empirically study the total effect,mechanism,and heterogeneity at the national level of the deep impact of regional trade agreements on net exports of service trade.At the same time,the mechanism of regional trade agreements on service trade is empirically tested,and it is proposed that financial development differences will affect the relationship between regional trade agreements and service trade.The empirical results indicate that the signing of regional trade agreements can promote the import and export of service trade,improve the overall quality of service trade,and promote the exchange of service trade between countries.This conclusion is still valid after a series of robustness tests,such as instrumental variable method,dynamic panel estimation,changing the measurement method of core variables,and removing samples that may have abnormalities;The mechanism test shows that the improvement of financial development cannot promote the import and export of service trade,but will have a inhibitory effect on the net export of service trade.That is,the greater the difference in financial development level,the less conducive the core depth will be to promoting the net export of service trade.Based on theoretical analysis and empirical testing,this article proposes that in the future,if China wants to expand the scope of signing regional trade agreements,it should actively participate in regional economic cooperation,multilateral trade reform,and increase the expansion of free trade networks to strengthen trade facilitation measures.The research innovation of this article mainly lies in: firstly,this article focuses on countries and regions that have signed regional trade agreements with China,constructs an indicator system for measuring the depth of regional trade agreements,enriches relevant theoretical research on WTO,WTO,etc.,and studies the economic benefits of establishing regional trade agreements.Furthermore,from a broad perspective,this article constructs an indicator system for measuring the depth of regional trade agreements,and empirically analyzes the specific impact mechanisms;Secondly,this article proposes that differences in financial development are possible pathways and channels for the impact of the relationship between regional trade agreements and service trade.From the perspective of financial development differences,it has certain guiding significance for further optimizing the environment for signing regional trade agreements and achieving quality and efficiency improvement in service trade exports;Thirdly,this paper further examines the special effects of the signing of regional trade agreements on the net export of service trade under different sub dimensions of developed countries and non developed countries,as well as the Belt and Road countries and non the Belt and Road countries.This study provides useful insights into promoting the signing of regional trade agreements for net exports of service trade.