| The report of the 19 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China pointed out that to promote the formation of a new pattern of comprehensive openness,visa facilitation is an inevitable trend in solving the problem of "unconnected,unconnected,and unobstructed" between countries,and is the development of economic globalization in the new era.General Secretary Xi Jinping also proposed an inevitable requirements to speed up the construction of inland open highlands,which urgently requires a visa facilitation policy package,a port visa and a transit visa-free policy,and a seamless connection between international aviation and railways,and Yangtze River water transport.In terms of personnel exchanges between China and foreign countries,in 2017,the first stop for mainland Chinese residents to go abroad is expected to exceed 60 million,and more than 30,000 overseas companies will be set up,with about 1 million overseas laborers and 1.37 million international students.In 2018,the Department of Consular Affairs of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs will introduce new measures to significantly reduce the fees for Chinese citizens to apply for consular certification at embassies and consulates abroad,and adopt new measures such as bidding for passports and optimizing overseas Chinese visas.The state attaches great importance to and develops visa facilitation.It has implemented a 144-hour transit visa exemption policy at airports such as “Jiangsu,Zhejiang and Shanghai”,“Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei” and “Shenyang Dalian”,which not only meets the actual needs of transit foreign tourists,but also to these areas.The integration of aviation,tourism,business exhibition resources and the coordinated development of regional economy have played an active role.Therefore,analyzing the impact of port visa and transit visa exemption policy on China’s urban exports,and further exploring spatial geography factors,is of great significance for understanding the visa-free mode,promoting the implementation of port visas and transit visa-free policies.Based on the status of China’s new visa-free mode,namely port visa and transit visa-free,this paper constructs a spatial gravity model using unilateral trade data between China’s cities and countries around the world from 2007 to 2015.From the perspective of urban and national level,study the impact of China’s port visa and transit visa-free mode on urban foreign trade exports.Based on the Heckman two-step method,the first phase uses the Probit model to analyze whether the visa-free system will have a higher probability of trade between the city and the country;the second phase analyzes whether the port visa and transit visa-free will make the volume of trade between them increase more.By further establishing a spatial gravity model,it is analyzed whether there are spatial factors affecting the export trade of port visas and transit visas to cities and countries,in order to provide a scientific basis for further promoting the development of port visas and visa-free policies.The results of this study indicate that:(1)The implementation of the port visa and transit visa exemption policy is conductive to the establishment of trade relations between the port city and the agreement country,especially the port visa.The two policies have a positive impact on China’s overall prefecture-level cities.However,according to the urban economy,the more developed the economy,the port visa and transit visa exemption policy have a greater positive impact on them.Due to the existence of contractual effects,it may have a certain inhibitory effect on the city’s foreign trade exports,while not very significant;for inland cities,the western government has fewer visa-free ports,and the positive effect of the transit visa-free policy is not particularly obvious.(2)In the international trade market where transit visa exemption and port visas are introduced,the suppression of trade by geographical distance has no greater influence on the traditional gravity model.By transforming the geographical distance into two parts: domestic distance and international distance,it is found that the domestic distance has a suppression effect on trade of 50-90 times of the international transportation distance,that is,the domestic trade cost is much larger than the international trade cost.Based on the trade facts and marginal cost theory,the more the maritime distance increases,the lower the transportation cost,the lower the trade cost,and the greater the competitiveness of the product,which in turn leads to the promotion of trade.(3)Heckman’s two-step approach corrects the estimated deviation of OLS’s trade impact on port visas and transit visa exemption policies,that is,the visa exemption policy promotes trade between cities and countries.In international trade,the existence of zero trade flows will have a bias towards the real impact of port visas and transit visas on trade.This paper finds that the visa-free policy has positive significance for establishing trade relations and trade volume between cities and countries.(4)The results of the space gravity model show that spatial geography factors will affect trade,that is,the port visa and transit visa exemption status of surrounding cities have a certain impact on the trade of the central city.Based on the geographical location,the port visas and transit visa exemptions of the surrounding cities have a positive effect on the eastern coastal economic bel t and the central city of the central economic belt.From the perspective of spatial location,the lower the level of economic development is,the greater the role of the visa-free policy play. |
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