Formation Mechanism And Characteristic Of Opportunistic Behavior In Foreign Trade Of China

Based on the theory of opportunism, this article looked at the instance of a number of opportunistic behavior in the field of foreign trade of China, analyzed the causes and formation mechanisms, and proposed the idea of governance.By summarizing the relevant literature of domestic and foreign trade-related opportunistic behavior, the author found that there’s lack of uniform study on various opportunistic behavior in foreign trade and analysis on their formation mechanisms. So the author decided to study the opportunistic behaviors in the foreign trade in China in these two aspects.Firstly, according to the existing case information, this article broadly divided the opportunistic behavior on China’s foreign trade divided into four types:(1) Foreign trade contract fraud;(2) Bilateral opportunistic behavior in the foreign trade;(3) Companies’behavior of using the system loopholes of China;(4) Smuggling. And it cited examples for each type of opportunistic behavior, such as903tax fraud,"Yuan Hua" smuggling case and so on.After that, this article made an analysis of the causes and formation mechanism of the various types of cases cited before. The main causes of opportunistic in foreign trade are:(1) self-serving motive, opportunistic behavior rooted in people’s seeking for more interests of their own;(2) bounded rationality, that is, people cannot do as rationally as they want because of complexity of actual world.(3) information asymmetry, the one with more information is most likely to make use of their information advantage to get more revenue;(4) the incompleteness of contracts;(5) the existence of specific assets;(6) institutional weakness.By the analysis above, the author found that the opportunistic behaviors in the foreign trade had special characteristics. For example, because of greater spatial distance, cultural gap and so on, the opportunistic behaviors are with higher probability to happen, and the performance was more complex. So it would make greater harm and will be harder to control. So it’s important to find an effective governance mechanism to prevent our country and the companies from opportunistic behaviors in foreign trade. In this work the author took the characteristics and causes of opportunistic behavior in the foreign trade in consideration, and put forward several governance ideas and policy proposals in three aspects. First, the Government should improve the legal system and strengthen international cooperation. Second, the society organizations will have to try their best to reduce the information asymmetry by strengthening the guild organization or by establishing credit reference agencies. Finally, enterprises should tighten its review procedure for the audit of the main contract and enhance enterprise strategic alliance trust.