The Infrastructure And Export Trade On The "Belt And Road"

The "One Belt and One Road" Initiative is given by China to its surrounding countries.Unimpeded trade is a major task in building the Belt and Road.In recent years,China's trade with the countries along the Belt and Road continues to grow and has great potential.Expand trade cooperation has effects on economic growth and regional economic integration.Infrastructures in some developing countries along The Belt and Road are poor,and it presents bottleneck effect on the economic development and trade.In addition,the existence of trade barriers often cause inconvenience in trade expanding.China emphasized that facilities connectivity between the countries is the priority area for the"One Belt and One Road" Initiative,and advocate that countries along the Belt and Road should improve the connectivity of their infrastructure construction of transportation,energy,and information,and form an infrastructure network connecting all regions in Belt and Road.In this paper,I study the mechanism of the impact of infrastructure interconnection on trade through the existing literature,and summarized 3 routes through which the infrastructure influences corporate decision-making:improve the productivity,reduce the production cost and reduce the transaction cost.And then bring the 3 factors into Melitz heterogeneous-firm model,and proved that the infrastructure promotes the trade of enterprises.Because each type of infrastructure contains very rich content,and the situation of each country is very different,it is not reasonable to evaluate infrastructure conditions of the country with a single indicator.This paper establishes a composite infrastructure index containing multidimensional information.Based on the index,this paper build panel data from 2002 to 2013,and uses econometric model to explain these infrastructure's effect to China's export,and draws following conclusion:1.Traffic,energy,and information significantly increase China's export trade,and the impact of traffic infrastructure is the biggest;2.FTA has effect on reducing trade barriers and accelerating the process of regional economic integration;3.Complementary effect of OFDI is greater than substitution effect,and FCP has driving effect on export trade;4.There are geopolitical risks on the "Belt and Road",China prefer to trade with politically stable countries.