Clearance Costs And Global Value Chain Participation

In the era of global value chains,establishing of value-added trade statistics system can scale the trade flows of countries accurately.On the other hand,traditional trade barriers have been reduced so that procedures in international trade were taken as invisible market barriers by researchers recently.Cross-border procedures,border costs and customs clearance efficiency are considered to be the core elements of trade facilitation.This paper refers to the production decomposition model proposed by Koopman(2012)and Wang(2017a.b),based on MRIO2018 Indicator Table published by the Global Value Chain Research Institute of the UIBE constructed three indicators of global value chain participation,producting position and country export complexity.Measuring the global division of labor of countries along the Belt and Road,evaluating the customs clearance costs of each country by three variables: customs clearance time,number of documents required for customs clearance and customs clearance costs.Customs efficiency and global value chain conditions in China and other Belt and Road countries were examined in 2007-2017,through empirical analysis,it reveals the impact of customs facilitation on the participation of global value chains and the complexity of export technology in various countries.The results show that during the observation period 2006-2018,all regions have adopted customs clearance facilitation measures from the four aspects of "electronic declaration","inspection efficiency","infrastructure optimization" and "diversification of management system".However,in general,the cost of customs clearance is inversely proportional to the local economic development.In terms of GVC participation,"The Belt and Road" countries actively participate in the division of labor system in virtue of their rich resources,but "Belt and Road" countries global value chain embedding degree and mode is relatively single.As for GVC position,developed countries is located upstream compared with developing countries.Specifically in industry,the regions show complementary postures,but in high-end manufacturing,"The Belt and Road" countries and China in the back-end simple processing and assembly position.The same results are presented in terms of the complexity of national exports: developed countries especially European countries are significantly higher in global value chains than developing countries.The empirical model proves that the customs clearance time,the documents required for customs clearance and the cost of customs clearance have obvious negative effects on participation in the global value chain.Particularly,customs clearance time and customs clearance documents showed a decreasing marginal impact on participation in the global production chain.While customs clearance fee displayed an inverted U-shaped relationship with participation,and the marginal influence is increasing.On the other hand,the decline in customs clearance costs has a certain effect on the GVC position and the GVC height measured by the complexity of export technology.The results are instrumental to promote customs reform and also help with the process of trade facilitation in the Belt and Road countries.