An Empirical Study On Changes In The Structure Of China’s Menchandise Trade Under FTA

With the signed of Framework Agreement on Comprehensive Economic Co-operation between the People’s Republic of China and the Association of Southeast Asian Nations on November 4th, 2002,the development of the FTA of China has entered a new stage. As of July 2014, China has successively signed FTAs with 12 countries or regions, and the gradual deepening of negotiation with other countries of the FTA, such as the GCC and Australia. Signed FTAs not only have a positive impact on China ’s economic development and international trade, but also change the structure of import and export goods to some extent.The thesis is based on the theoretical basis of the theory of comparative advantage, factor endowment theory, theory of customs union and the theory of free trade zone, and introduces the history of our country to sign the free trade agreement,and compares with the trade combination index 、 the trade specialization index 、 the revealed comparative advantage index and the trade complementarity index between the FTA partners and non- FTA partners, and applies the panel data model and other measurement methods, and selects the country trade datas from 1996 to 2012,to study the impacts of FTA on changes in the structure of import and export goods.The studies have shown that the FTA has an effect on expanding trade scale of China’s export goods and improves the structure of export goods, and this influence will change with time. The trade scale has a significant growth between China and the the FTA partners in the early stage of the signed of FTA, and the growth becomes slowness after; The same time, the FTA significantly improves the structure of China’s export trade in goods, but different FTAs have different effects on the export structure of different categories of goods.Meanwhile, the signed of FTAs in the overall play a greater role on the scale of import and the structure of imports goods in promoting improvements, and the impacts of the FTAs on the import goods trade in our country are not the same. The countries or regions which signed FTA with China in the early time show good development trend of import and the FTAs have good effects on all types of import goods; the FTAs have a positive effect on the import trade to some extent which are signed latter, particularly the larger trade base and the big scale of trade.In addition, there are some FTAs due to limited or do not fully explore the potential show a steady trend on the import volatility index,but because of the smaller impact factor and scale, they have little impact on import trade.