| As an important measure in the field of international trade, trade facilitation gradually shows its importance to enhance the world trade flow. WTO and regional economic cooperation organizations value the development in this field. In 2001, WTO Doha Ministerial Declaration suggested to review GATT V, VIII and X which related to trade facilitation, as well as put trade facilitation into the WTO negotiation agenda. APEC Leaders at their 10th Meeting in Mexico 2002 passed the "APEC Trade Facilitation Action Plan (TFAP)" with a goal of reducing transaction costs across the region by 5% till 2006, while APEC's second Trade Facilitation Action Plan (TFAP II) responded to a call by APEC Leaders at their Meeting in Busan 2005 for a further reduction of trade transaction costs by 5% till 2010.Although the international organizations accept that trade facilitation is importance on enhancing trade flow and decrease the transaction cost, most of the study on trade facilitation is still in a lower level up till now. Firstly, the normative study on trade facilitation is much more than the empirical study. The fields and problems that trade facilitation covers are difficult to be quantified. There are quite a lot of analysis and reports focusing on the introduction of trade facilitation to enhance international trade, economic development and national welfare, while little with operational measurements. Only a few international institutions such as World Bank and OECD have made the quantitative analysis on the major fields of trade facilitation and created the econometrics models to study it. Secondly, there is no existing theory special for trade facilitation. The current discuss on trade facilitation is focusing on the concepts, fields and the action plan, etc. There is no systematical trade facilitation theory.This dissertation reviewed the existing concepts, fields and action plans for trade facilitation in details, as well as the relative theories for it, including Transaction Cost Theory under the open market, Tariff Union Theory, Common Market Theory, Free Trade Area Theory, New Regionalism Theory, as the theoretical basics for studying trade facilitation under the framework of regional economic integration organizations. The research continued on the analysis and study of the development of global regional economic integration, regional trade agreements, as well as the progress of trade facilitation. Then, from the angel of trade facilitation, the dissertation analyzed the development of trade facilitation in regional economic organizations, made the estimation and empirical study of trade facilitation by selecting the representative regional economic organizations among the world, and reviewed the trade facilitation development in China while providing the relative policy suggestions. As a non-institutional regional economic organization, APEC paid much attention on the trade facilitation measurements in the practical areas and created APEC Trade Facilitation Action Plan I and II focusing on the four major trade facilitation fields including Customs Procedures, Standards and Conformance, Business Mobility and Electronic Commerce. The member economies operated the individual trade facilitation activities according to the measures listed in the Action Plan. The dissertation studied the goals, principles and contents of trade facilitation comparatively within 8 regional trade agreements in Asia-Pacific region. The conclusion suggested that all of these regional trade agreements have taken the trade facilitation as the goal and created the items accordingly.The estimation and empirical study of trade facilitation is the most important part of the dissertation, which provided the quantitative study of trade facilitation. Firstly, the dissertation reviewed the estimation on trade facilitation made by the international institutions such as OECD, APEC and World Bank, etc. and made them the basics for quantitative analysis. Secondly, the dissertation analyzed the existing models for empirical study on trade facilitation in detail and selected the gravity model as the basic model of quantitative analysis in the research. Thirdly, the dissertation adopted Port Efficiency, Customs Procedures, Regulatory Environment and E-Commerce as the trade facilitation indexes, 4 major regional economic integration organizations (EU, APEC, ASEAN, LAIA) among the world, trade flow of 4 manufacture industries in 52 countries and economies, and used the gravity model to analyze the effect of trade facilitation on trade flows.The result of the econometrics analysis showed that (1) The econometrics result of GDP and distances was in accordance to the theoretical prediction; (2) The GDP of the member economies enhance the bilateral trade obviously, which was much more sensitive to the economic development level of the export country. However, the trade liberation was remaining to be the most important fact to influence the international trade; (3) The estimated elasticity of the trade flow to different trade facilitation index was different, which meant that different trade facilitation measures may have various effect on the export of a country. The Port Efficiency had positive effect to the bilateral trade in both export and import countries, and the elasticity was similar. The effect of Customs Procedures of import countries was less than that of the Port Efficiency. The Customs Procedures mainly focused on import procedures; therefore, there was no co-efficiency to export theoretically, which is proved by the econometrics result. The effect of Regulatory Environment and E-Commerce to export and import countries was different to the effect of Port Efficiency to both kinds of countries. Better regulatory environment and e-commerce had negative effect to import but positive effect to export. The 5 dummy varieties had positive effect on trade flow. The four regional economic integration organizations, EU, APEC, ASEAN and LAIA, had different driving functions to bilateral trade. ASEAN influenced the bilateral trade within the region the most. LAIA ranked the second. The influence of APEC to trade was far less than that of ASEAN. EU as the mature regional economic integration organization had the least effect to trade. The influence of common language to trade is higher than that of EU and APEC, but lower than that of ASEAN and LAIA.At last, based on the research above, the dissertation analyzed the current trade facilitation development of China and accordingly suggested policy implications. By putting trade facilitation index of the years of 2002, 2005 and 2008 into a radar graph under the international framework, the dissertation suggested the following findings. Although the trend in port efficiency in China was not obvious compare to other countries, the development in water transportation, airport transportation and infrastructural construction made a lot of progress in terms of implement of the measures and related regulatory development. In contrast, the trend of custom procurement is quite clear: the score didn't overcome the average level of 45 countries and both of the score and the ranking became worse in the past 6 years. As a result, the ongoing project of "Simplify Customs Clearance Procedures" would benefit the development of custom procurement. In the field of institutional environment, the score peaked at the year 2008 while the score of 2005 was the lowest within the 6 years. Among the three aspects of institutional environment-laws and regulations, government policy, as well as bureaucracy, bribe and corruption, the last one was the weakest compare to others. As a result, the Chinese government is strengthening the laws and regulations in terms of trade, setting up the regulations on competition policy and intellectual property right and enhancing the transparency of regulations and policies. The gap of e-Business among countries was narrowing during the past 6 years. The internet and computer users in China are among the top in the world, however, there is a long way for Chinese per capita internet and computer users to go to catch up with world level. To sum up, there are three key policy implications for the development of trade facilitation in China. First, strengthen the trade facilitation related laws, regulations and policies. Second, invest in the infrastructures related to trade facilitation according to demand in China and international standard. Third, communicate and cooperate with other countries, accept technological support from other countries. |
