Theoretical And Empirical Research On The Impact Of The Export Trading Partners On The Economic Growth

As the economic globalization is becoming increasingly fierce, the developmentof a country’s economy is more and more solid with the international system, and therole of their export structures is more important. Many studies have confirmed theimportant role of the export trade for economic growth, these studies are moreconcerned about the export trade value or trade openness. But the relationshipbetween a country’s long-term economic growth may not export "how much", butexport "what" like the commodity structure or technology structure; Recently theresearch has investigated a meaningful reality that the technology embedded inproducts, services or capital is exported from poor countries to the rich countries.They came to a conclusion that the economic growth may concern not only with thestructure of export commodities, but also with export destination, which is the exportmarket structure. The choice of a country’s trading partners will have a greater impacton its own economic growth.Based on the above background, the focus of this paper is to analyse themechanisms and channels in which national economic growth are affected by tradingpartners, mainly from the number of trading partners, concentrated degree, economicconditions, the geographic distance and institutional distance, trading partners’investment and the R&D, as well as cultural distance.And then to select and measure the index of the export trading partnercharacteristics, and comparatively analyse of the number of export trading partners,export concentration, and economic conditions and so on to the country’s (includingthe developed countries and developing countries) economic growth. Referring toBarro (1995) growth regression model, bringing into the characteristic variables ofthe trading partners, we make an empirical analysis using panel data of53countries,through the GLS regression and Quantile regression. The results of GLS regressionshow that the number of exporting countries’ non-OECD partners is negative and notsignificant to domestic economic growth, while the effect of the number of OECDpartners, is significant forward to promote the national economic growth;exportconcentration is a "U"-type effect; trading partners’ economic growth is conducive toeconomic growth of the exporting country; the trading partners’ relative income levelto domestic and national economic growth is a positive correlation, but not significantly; the impact of trading partners with the country’s geographic distance onthe national economic growth is significant; the institutional distance between tradingpartners and the country will promote national economic growth, but can’t determinewhether the distance is a positive distance or a negative one.And the quantile regression indicates that, from the lower tail to the upper tail ofthe conditional growth distribution, the effect of trading partners varies: the positiveeffect of the number is weakening; the U-shaped effect of export concentration onlydoes at the upper tail; the trading partner’s economic growth is most evident in thepositive effect of the low point of national economic growth; the regressioncoefficient of relative income levels of the trading partners of the country’s economicgrowth is gradually reduced, but the effect is gradually increasing; the role ofgeographical distance to national economic growth first restrains and then promotes;the effect of institutional distance to national economic growth is becoming frompositive to negative, and from0.85quartile begins positive again. Different countriescan choose the suitable structure of trading partners according to their growth stagesof development.Finally, on the basis of the previous analysis, I make some feasiblerecommendations to enhance the country’s economic growth and to optimize thestructure of export trading partners.