The Research On The Cross-border Economic Cooperation Between China And North Korean Border Areas

After years of reforming and opening up, China has made considerable progress in the national economy. However, along with our country market economy’s vigorous development, intensifying competition and industrial upgrading, the problem of the regional fiscal gap and unbalanced economic development ha s emerged, such as the fiscal gap among coastal cities, inland cities and border cities, the fiscal gap among the eastern area, the central region, western region and northeast China. Domestic and abroad scholars have done lots of studies and governments have rolled out regional polices in response to the regional fiscal gap arising from unbalanced economic development, for example, Chinese government rolled out policies to promote the regional cooperation and integration and implemented the strategy of ‘Northeast Revitalization’. Many of those studies and policies are about border areas participating cross-border economic cooperation. Baishai is an interior border open city located in northeast C hina, which is representative and has a relatively significant research value, therefore, this paper taking Baishan city as an example analyzes the cross-border economic cooperation between C hina and North Korea from the perspectives of border effect, regional economic integration and others.Two roads, one county- level city and seven counties in Baishan sit on the bank of the Yalu River, facing the Democratic People’s Republic of Korea on the other side of the river. There are four counties or county-level cities, due to geographical and regional conditions, making North Korea the main foreign trade partner of Baishan, so the boundary effect of baishan has important influence on trade development. From the regional angle, Baishan city should have a greater advantage as an interior border city. However, the closure and backwardness of North Korea make the boundary effect hindering regional economic development from playing a relatively important role, which will lead to Baishan city facing many barriers in the development of border trade. Therefore, the analysis and study about the influence of boundary effect on border trade development of Baishan city and how the role of boundary effect should be transformed become important issues to solve and study. And as a representative area of inland border cities, the research on Baishan city can provide reference for C hinese border cities where have similar features with Baishan.This paper analyzes the main factors which have influence on Baishan city participating the cross-border economic cooperation, including domestic factors and foreign factors. These influencing factors embrace language and cultural differences, differences of economic policies, the industrial structure, information asymmetry and other factors. This paper presents and summarizes the development of the cross-border economic cooperation between C hina and North Korea, and the development of the cross-border economic cooperation between Baishan city and North Korea. Moreover, this paper presents and analyzes behaviors of Chinese central government, Chinese local government, North Korean central government and North Korean local government, and the influences of these government behaviors during the cross-border economic cooperation. In addition, policy recommendations have been provided according to above analyses.