A Study On The Issues Of RMB As Coross-Border Trade Settlement Currency

From the financial crisis in2007, the world recognized the defects and the potential risks of international monetary system dominated by U.S. dollar, and began to call for reform of the international monetary system, reducing the status of the U.S. dollar in the international monetary system, and enhance the role of other international currencies. In recent years, the internationalization of the RMB is a hot topic, and with significantly improvement of China’s economic, China has already had the basic conditions of the internationalization of the RMB. Currently, as a first step towards the internationalization of the RMB-the business of cross-border trade RMB settlement has developed rapidly, but there still exist some problems, so this paper will make a thoughtful study this topic.Firstly, this paper presents a literature review, and the conclusion of the literature shows that economic strength, the exchange-rate regime, the characteristics of the industry, market structure, network externalities, historical inertia, and macroeconomic policy have the main effect on the settlement currency selection in the international trade. Then, respectively, from a macro perspective and micro perspective, we discuss the factors of international trade settlement currency selection from the theoretical analysis. The theoretical analysis finds that a country’s comprehensive national strength, the level of financial development, currency characteristics, product differentiation, transaction costs have a significant impact on the choice of international trade settlement currency. In order to test the results of theoretical analysis, we use unbalanced panel data for20countries to do an empirical test, and empirical results show that the transaction costs and the elasticity of demand for export products have a significant impact on the choice of international trade settlement currency.In order to make the conclusion more close to reality, this paper analyzes the situation of RMB as cross-border trade settlement currency from the three aspects of the total amount, structure, costs and benefits. The results show that RMB settlement of cross-border trade is growing very quickly, but its proportion is still very low in China’s merchandise trade. RMB settlement of cross-border trade is imbalance in trade structure, geographical structure and inflow and outflow. RMB settlement of cross-border trade of pros and cons, its cost is not easy to measure. Besides, there still exist the problems of small-scale, structural imbalance of receipt and payment and mismatch of costs and benefits. The reasons for these problems are low acceptance of RMB, lack of reflux channels and offshore market, and imperfect cross-border payment system.To solve these problems, China should improve the competitiveness of enterprises, enhance its banks the service capabilities, strengthen economic cooperation with Asian countries, reform the domestic financial market, develop the offshore RMB market in Hong Kong and construct a independent RMB cross-border payment system. These measures will play vital role in promoting the use of RMB in cross-border trade settlement.