Production Outsourcing And Regional Economic Cooperaton:Theoty And Empirical Research

In recent years, a lot of bilateral free trade agreements emerge. When governments seek for partner to reach FTAs, besides political considerations, they care more about national welfare. Does the existing economic links such as trade, investment, and outsourcing could produce "gravitation effect" that facilitates bilateral free trade agreements (FTAs) between the two countries? If the gravitation effects exist, what role does it play? In view of the production division have been becoming a new trend of the international productive specialization, and outsourcing between countries have also been increasingly close, this article takes the productive outsourcing as object of study, makes a research on the "gravitational effect" caused by existing economic links between countries.on this basis, the feasibility of RCEP and TPP is analyzed theoretically. In addition, this paper also illustrates difficulties respectively that TPP and RCEP faced in the process, providing reference for people who want to make a judgment on the feasibility of the these two framework agreement.Main research results of this paper are as follows:1. Outsourcing growth rapidly worldwide, particularly in the Asia-Pacific region. Compared with TPP, outsourcing links among RCEP internal member countries are closer.2. In addition to the independent variables in the traditional gravity model, difference of factor endowments and technology gap, which reflect the difference of comparative advantage between two countries, also play a role in interpreting the outsourcing growth.Regression results show that the technology gap have a significant promoting effect both in the global scope and the Asia-Pacific region; Difference of factor endowments have a significant effect only when the sample cover all the world, when sample is confined to the Asia-Pacific region, or to the TPP and RCEP internal countries, difference of factor endowments do not show significant effect in promoting the development of outsourcing links between countries.3. By building bilateral outsourcing links model, utilizing the ideas of Cournot Competition, we explore the welfare changes of two countries after reaching FTAs respectively. Research result shows that the closer is the original outsourcing links, the more gains of the two countries can get after FTAs; in turn the governments have stronger willing to reaching FTAs.4. Through constructing a Probit model, using1998-2011panel data in96countries around the world, we make empirical test in "gravitation effects" of outsourcing links on the reaching of bilateral FTAs. The empirical results show that the existing outsourcing link play a promoting role in reaching bilateral FTAs, and the promoting effects are more obvious in the Asia-Pacific region.5. Compared with the TPP situation, the outsourcing links between member countries of RCEP are closer, if the reaching of bilateral FTAs would promote trade liberalization in the whole area, then from the point of view of outsourcing link, the RCEP is more feasible to achieve a unified free trade area than TPP.