An Empirical Study Of The Duration Of Import Trade In China

The analysis of Chinese import trade has come into an important issue for the academic research. However, most studies analyze the problem of Chinese import trade from the macro-level perspective, only a small parts of studies are concentrated on the duration of Chinese import trade. This paper focuses on the duration of Chinese import trade, using Chinese import trade data to examine Chinese import relationships with other countries by the method of survival analysis over the period2000to2006.First, From the micro-level perspective, Chinese import trade relationships with other countries are short, dynamic and changing all the time. Many relationships die, and at the same time many new relationships come into being.Then, we selects language, GDP per capita, GDP, distances, trading volumes and initial trading volumes as the variables which affect the duration of import trade. We use Kaplan-Meier curves to describe the mode of the duration of import trade relations and the impact of factors on the duration of import trade relations. After this, we use Cox proportion hazard model to analyze the impact of factors on the duration of import trade relations comprehensively and we get estimation from it. We find that language, GDP per capita, GDP, product trading volumes and initial trading volumes have positive influences on the duration of Chinese import trade, and distance has negative influences on the duration of Chinese import trade. GDP per capita and distance are the most important factors on the dufation of Chinese import trade, GDP and trading volumes are less important, all factors are significant under the degree of0.001. Finally, we give some corresponding recommendations of policy according to the empirical results.