An Analysis Of Fta Network Construction And Rules' Association Of Countries Along The “ Belt And Road”

With the retardation of the WTO-oriented multilateral trade negotiation and the intensification of the Sino-US trade game under the moves of deglobalization,the priority of China's new round of opening up is to accelerate the rate of constructing free trade areas with countries along the “Belt and Road” and building a highstandard FTA network.At present,China has not signed a number of FTAs with countries along the “Belt and Road”.However,taking the FTAs under negotiation into consideration,China is actively seeking to sign FTAs with countries along the route.From this point of view,it is of great significance to study the status quo and the characteristics of FTAs signed by the countries along the route for China to embed in the“Belt and Road”FTA network better.This paper collected the texts of 169 valid FTAs signed by the countries along the “Belt and Road” before January 2019 from RTA database on WTO website.Firstly,through placing China in the FTA network along the “Belt and Road”,the current situation of the construction has been elaborated from the dimension of time and contracting parties.And the number of cross-regional FTAs and the coverage of FTAs in different areas have been summarized as well.secondly,the word frequency analysis method and the TF-IDF have been utilized to extract terms from the texts for analyzing the development and the characteristics of FTAs.Thirdly,text clustering method has been used to analyze the similarity of the FTAs signed by the countries along the “Belt and Road”.Finally,on the basis of transferring the termdocument matrix to a co-occurrence matrix(adjacent matrix),the keyword cooccurrence network has been built,which can be used to analyze the association of FTA rules.There are two possible innovation of this paper.Firstly,up to now,domestic and foreign scholars have made comprehensive research on the content of the FTA and the FTA network along the “Belt and Road”.But there is few research studying the content of FTAs signed by the countries along the route.Secondly,this paper has mainly adopted the methods of word frequency analysis and text clustering,which are commonly used in text analysis.What's more,the method of social network analysis has also been used to analyze the association of rules.