The Greater Mekong Sub-regional Trade Facilitation

In recent years, through a combination of multilateral, regional, and unilateral efforts and cooperation, all countries and regional trade liberalization has been significantly improved, their opening scale has expands unceasingly, average tariff level has dropped significantly, a lot of non-tariff trade barriers are reduced, the impact by the traditional tariff and non-tariff barriers to international trade is gradually diminished. However, when the trade liberalization achieved outstanding results, the impact to trade is gradually diminished, and difficult to have breakthrough progress again. Meanwhile, the obstacle of cross-border flows of goods and factors still exist, and "non-trade efficiency" is becoming a bigger concern. The trade facilitation reforms likes simplification of trade procedures, clear mechanisms and institutional barriers in the process of trade, lowering transaction costs, promote trade efficiency has become the key of the trade reform.This thesis focuses on the key issue, comprehensive and systematic analysis and research on the regional trade facilitation issues, based on the practical of GMS’s. First, This thesis reviewed the existing concepts and fields of trade facilitation, as well as the relative theories for it, then introduce the current research status of domestic and foreign study on trade facilitation; Secondly, analysis the current bilateral trade situation between China and sub-regional countries, and the GMS’s trade facilitation level with the World Bank Doing Business database and the Global Competitiveness Report; Third, the thesis adopted Port Efficiency, Customs Procedures, Regulatory Environment and E-Commerce as the trade facilitation indexes, and use the gravity model that include the trade facilitation indexes, to analyze the effect of trade facilitation on trade flow. At last, based on the research above, puts forward some possible suggestions for GMS, China, and Yunnan province on the reform of trade facilitation.The results of this study shows that the sub-regional trade exchanges and cooperation has improved continuously, except the impact of financial crisis, the increase rate of total trade of GMS members could more than20%. But, in the same time the GMS’s overall level of trade facilitation is still low, promote the trade facilitation reform would have obvious forward influence to GMS’s export.