The Construction Of Trade Facilitation Index System And Its Effect On China’s Export Trade

After several years of multilateral and bilateral trade negotiations, the world’s trading system is becoming more open, the overall tariff rate has plunged, non-tariff trade barriers are a large number of cuts, and trade liberalization has made great progress. But with substantial tariff cuts, the traditional tariff adjustment room becomes smaller and smaller, the liberalization of trade negotiations becomes more and more difficult, the influence of tariff and non-tariff trade barriers on international trade becomes weaker and weaker. Meanwhile, "trade facilitation" as a recessive trade barrier, is drawing increasing attention of various international organizations, governments and the domestic scholars. In recent years, the reason why cross-border trade can’t go smoothly in many cases, to a large extent is that there are many institutional and technical obstacles, the trade process and relevant formalities are quite tedious. Whether trade is convenient has become an important factor that affects the development of international trade. Trade facilitation is gradually becoming the focus of global attention.Around the hot topic of trade facilitation, this paper sums up the existing research results including at home and abroad, from the meaning of trade facilitation, on the basis of predecessors’ research results, combined with trade facilitation connotation of the new extensions, firstly build the comprehensive index system of trade facilitation, and use the principal component analysis of SPSS software to give weight to indexes. Then use the building up the index system of trade facilitation to measures the level of 50 countries including China, from 2009 to 2014.Calculation results show that there are large differences of the trade facilitation level in countries around the world. The developed country always has a high level of trade facilitation, while the less developed country’s trade facilitation level is often low, and the level of trade facilitation in China is at the world’s average level, which means there is plenty of room for improvement. Then based on the extension and modification of the existing gravity model, have a empirical research on the relationship between the level of trade facilitation and the export trade of our country. Results show that the increase of the importing countries level of trade facilitation helps to increase the export trade from our country, and the effect on the volume of trade is far more than tariff concession. The empirical results also show that among the index of the four trade facilitation indexs, port efficiency and the facilitation of e-commerce are prominent for the influence of trade flows. Finally, based on the calculation and empirical research results, this paper put forward some policy suggestions on the trade facilitation’s level promotion.