Research On The Impacting Mechanism Of Forest-Related Climate Negotiations On China’s International Trade In Wood Products

With the deepening of the international climate change negotiations, countries have adjusted the trade policy and forestry policy protect the country’s forest resources based on the framework convention on climate negotiations, the purpose of which is to protect forest resources at home. These policies and measures would obviously have an impact and influence on international trade in wood products while protecting forest resources. Theoretically, research on the impact of forest-related climate negotiations on China’s international trade in wood products currently is still in the stage of logical reasoning, and presume that the climate negotiations might directly or indirectly influence the international trade of wood products through a series of tariff and non-tariff measures. In fact, climate negotiations in forest issues not only influence the forestry policies and international trade policies of wood products involving China and other countries, but also may influence the economic development and technological innovation in wood industry, all of which in turn may have a significant impact on the level of China’s international trade of wood products. Therefore, the paper can greatly enrich the research results of existing theories by theoretically analyzing and empirically testing the impacting mechanism of forest-related climate negotiations on China’s international trade of wood products. Specifically, this study will focus on the following aspects:Firstly, this paper reviews the relevant researches on climate negotiations and international trade of wood products, and finds a research gap about the impacting mechanism of forest-related climate negotiations on international trade of wood products, and defines the research question. Then it defines the key concepts of climate change, climate negotiations, forest-related climate negotiations, and also defines the scope of wood products in this study. This paper introduces the development of forest-related climate negotiations. Specifically, it describes the development process of climate negotiations and important forestry issues in international climate negotiations; explains the political, economic and technological significance of forest-related climate negotiations, and analyzes the policy responses and actions of each country under the background forest-related climate negotiations.Secondly, this paper focuses on analyzing the impacting mechanism of forest-related climate negotiations on Chinese wood trade. The results show that trade policies and forest policies moderate the relationship between forest-related climate negotiations and wood products trade. In the content of "United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change" and "Kyoto Protocol", forest resources have been emphasized as an important strategic tool to cope with climate change and climate negotiations. In order to protect their forest resources, countries in the world all formulate a series of trade policies and forest policies to crack down on illegal logging. However, the trade policies and forest policies can easily be transformed into trade barrier, which in turn affect the international trade of wood products. This paper finally deeply explores the quantity control mechanism, price control mechanism and the dynamic dual mechanism of forest-related climate negotiations on wood trade.Thirdly, this paper empirically examines the impact of forest-related climate negotiations on China’s trade related policies. This paper first establishes the index system of forest and trade policies based on literature review and expert interviews. Then we use fuzzy comprehensive evaluation to test the impacting degree of three forest-related climate negotiations on relative forest and trade policies based on the data collected. The result shows that forest-related climate negotiations have a deep influence on relative policies, which implies that the trade policies and forest policies formulated in recent years is closely related to forest-related climate negotiations. We also find that the impacting degree of three forest-related climate negotiations on forest and trade policies is the same. The result show that forest-related climate negotiations do force countries in the world all endeavour to formulate a series of policies to protect their forest to fully paly the role of forest in treating climate negotiations.Fourthly, based on the empirical result of the impact of forest-related climate negotiations on Chinses trade and forest policies, this paper next empirically tests the impact of relative policies on Chinese wood trade. In view of the time lagging and hidden effect, we will focus on the effect of trade policy on Chinese wood trade. It proposes the theoretical logic of forest-related climate negotiations on the import and export of wood products, and establishes an expanded gravity model to empirically examines the impact of technical trade political barrier set by forest-related climate negotiations on China’s plywood export and log import using the trade data between China and EU countries. The findings show that policy settings resulting from forest-related climate negotiations have a positive influence on China’s plywood exports, and have a negative impact on China’s log imports. So we discover that policy settings resulting from forest-related climate negotiations indeed have a significant influence on wood products internaltional trade.Finally, from the macro, meso and micro levels, this paper respectively puts forward some suggestions for the Chinese government, industry associations and enterprises to cope with forest-related climate negotiations.