The Impact Of Trade Facilitation On The Export Sophistication

From a global perspective,"Trade Facilitation Agreement" has entered into force and its implementation will facilitate trade among all countries in the world.It will reduce transaction costs and promote the growth of world trade as well as the global economy.The trade facilitation has become more and more profound and indispensable to the trade of each country and the world.This means that the research on the measures and effects of trade facilitation is particularly important nowadays.China has made a breakthrough in both trade volume and trade structure in 2017,and the export sophistication has been increasing year after year.This phenomenon has reflected the great policy effects,which is due to the country's continuous efforts to improve trade facilitation conditions.From the above we can see that trade facilitation indeed has an important impact on the export sophistication.The concept of export sophistication not only expands the existing research perspective of international trade,but also provides a good analytical tool for the study of issues of the contemporary international trade.Combining the trade facilitation and the export sophistication provides a new perspective for related fields and has both theoretical and practical significance.Based on the combination of related theories of the international trade,this paper elaborates the theoretical mechanism of the trade facilitation on the export sophistication.This paper compiles the data of the World Economic Forum to obtain the enabling trade indices of 140 economies.And then this paper refers Hausmann' s method(2005)to calculate the export sophistication data using the HS Six-digit at the national level in these economies.Then,the paper provides the analyze of the development and status quo of trade facilitation and export sophistication separately,and then focuses on the comparative analysis of China's development and status quo of trade facilitation and export sophistication.On this basis,this paper has made an attempt to construct a panel data econometric model of trade facilitation's effect on the export sophistication.From the empirical point of view,the model takes the export sophistication of 140 economies in recent years as the research object,and the trade facilitation index as the core explanation variable.In order to make the model more comprehensive and complete,the model adds the factors such as factor endowment level,R&D expenditure,financial development index,and foreign direct investment into it.After that,the influence of trade facilitation on the export sophistication is discussed.Studies have shown that trade facilitation has generally raised the export sophistication,and the above conclusions are still robust after replacing core indicators,subsample regressions and endogenous tests.After a step-by-step grouping study of the measurement results,the following conclusions are drawn:Trade facilitation has a positive effect on the export sophistication,and this effect is more pronounced in middle-income countries.In addition,infrastructure shows the most significant effect to the export sophistication.Finally,the paper applies the conclusions of theoretical and empirical analysis to China on how to improve the level of export technical complexity from the perspective of trade facilitation.The paper puts forward some relevant policy recommendations,including raising the level of trade facilitation,reducing the restrictions on foreign investment and strengthening cooperation;With regard to the construction of infrastructure facilities,we will break the restrictions on the differences in infrastructure levels caused by geographical differences and achieve a balanced development.