Assessment Of Trade Facilitation And Its Relationship With Cross-border E-commerce Exports

The relationship between trade facilitation and cross-border e-commerce is complicated.This paper measures and estimates the impact of aggregate indicators of "soft" and "hard"infrastructure on cross-border e-commerce export performance of more than 100 WTO members.Using factor analysis method to derive four new indicators for 118 members over the period 2013-2016,including infrastructure,ICT use,port efficiency and regulatory environment.Then according to the definition of the World Bank,members are grouped according to income level for comparing the different impact of trade facilitation to different development level of members.Estimate results show that trade facilitation reforms do improve the cross-border e-commerce export performance between China and members.For instance,if improve infrastructure 1%,the cross-border e-commerce export between China and members will increase 2.419%,which means that improve the quality of port,air transport and road will have a positive impact on the growth of cross-border e-commerce export between China and other members.In addition,based on the estimate results of different income level group,found that trade facilitation indicators’ impact are so different because of development level.Each trade facilitation indicator have a different impact on four groups.For high income level group,regulation environment have the greatest effect in the cross-border e-commerce relationship with China.But for cross-border e-commerce export between China and upper-middle income and lower-middle income groups,infrastructure and ICT use are the most important factors.Trade facilitation dimension of ICT application have the greatest effect in the performance of cross-border e-commerce export between China and low income group.