A Study Of The Effect Of Regional Trade Costs Within APEC On Trade Growth

Trade costs has become a ring which cannot be ignored in international trade development.Under the circumstances of production costs is becoming more and more close,trade costs has become the focus of national competition.How to make lower trade cost of products has become a must-think question that the governments and related export enterprises should consider.Asia-Pacific region is currently the world’s most active economic development area.Headed by the United States,China,Asia-Pacific Economic Cooperation(APEC)is the region’s most inclusive organization.The Twenty-Second APEC informal leadership meeting started the process of the Asia-Pacific free trade zone,which will further eliminate trade barriers among members and continue rapid economic development of the Asia-Pacific region.Firstly,this paper analyzes the status of APEC member economies,trade and development.APEC members’ economic development vary greatly,and total bilateral trade between members account for nearly one-third of world trade,maintaining an important position in world trade.Secondly,this paper measures the trade costs among APEC main Members from 1999 to 2013.Results show that overall trade costs for main members of APEC have declined.Several years increased because of major economic events.The average trade cost between a single member and other members are quite different in size and decrease extent.Mexico,Peru,New Zealand,Canada,Chile and Philippines still have much room to fall.As for trade cost between single continent member and other continent members,Asia is the lowest and Europe and South America are the highest.Again,the paper makes a theoretical analyze the influence mechanism of different factors of trade cost’s impact on trade growth within the APEC region and learn classical gravity model,establishing panel data model using APEC main Members related data from 1992 to 2013,empirically estimating the influence of different factors of trade cost on trade growth among APEC members.The results show that bilateral trade cost factors and language difference have a strongly negative impact on the trade growth within the APEC region.However,common border and free trade agreement sign have no significant effects on trade growth.The impact of multilateral trade resistance factors on the trade balance within the APEC region is particularly significant,but the impact of exchange rate is relatively small.The proportion of APEC members that have common borders is very small,while too much bilateral and multilateral trade agreements bring the spaghetti bowl effect,which means different rules of origin export enterprises enjoy preferential treatment.To sum up,APEC members should strengthen economic and technological cooperation and cultural exchanges,and at the same time,improve infrastructure and accelerate the FTAAP process in order to reduce the cost of trade between members,promoting the growth of intraregional trade.