| Since the 21 st century,China’s service trade exports have developed rapidly and gradually become an important driver of China’s economic growth.However,there has been a large gap between China’s service trade exports and goods trade exports,with China’s total goods trade exports in 2020 being as much as nine times the total service trade exports,and domestic service trade showing an insufficient scale and a long-term deficit.Therefore,how to improve the level of service trade exports and narrow the service trade deficit has become an important issue facing China at present.As economic and political ties between countries grow closer,institutional quality has gradually become an important factor affecting international trade.In existing studies,scholars have examined the relevant factors affecting service trade exports from several perspectives,but few scholars have considered the impact of institutions on the exports of various service sectors in their own countries from the perspective of importing countries.Indeed,due to the complexity of international trade and the incomplete nature of contracts,the impact of the importing country’s regime on China’s service trade exports cannot be ignored,and this impact may vary depending on the service sector.Against this backdrop,this paper explores the impact of the quality of importing country regimes on China’s service trade exports at the industry level,taking the enhancement of China’s service trade export flows as an entry point.Firstly,we analyse the impact mechanism of importing countries’ institutional quality on China’s service trade export flows from the perspective of incomplete contracts,and analyse the impact mechanism from the three stages of the contract completion process,and supplement the impact mechanism with industry characteristics,which lays the foundation for the later overview and empirical analysis.Principal component analysis is then used to measure the institutional quality of importing countries,and a statistical analysis of the institutional quality profile of importing countries and the profile of China’s service trade exports is presented.In the empirical evidence,contractual intensity is introduced to measure the dependence of different service industries on institutions,and then a fixed-effects regression model is constructed by combining data from a sample of 11 service industries of China’s exports to 143 major trading partner countries during2005-2018,and the impact of the institutional quality of importing countries on China’s export trade in each service industry is empirically investigated using OLS and 2SLS measures.The results of the full-sample benchmark regression show that there is a significant impact of the improvement of the institutional quality of the importing country on China’s service trade exports,and the higher the contractual intensity of the service industry,the greater the positive impact of the institutional quality on the exports of that service industry.The heterogeneity regression results show that relative to importing countries with low institutional quality,the positive impact of improving the institutional quality of importing countries with high institutional quality on China’s exports of various service industries is greater;relative to low contract-intensive service industries,high contract-intensive service industries are more sensitive to changes in institutional quality,and the positive impact of improving the institutional quality of importing countries on China’s exports of high contract-intensive service products is greater.Finally,combining the results of the theoretical and empirical analyses,the main findings of the paper are summarized,and relevant suggestions are put forward to promote the development of China’s service trade exports at the national and industry levels. |
