Research On The Influence Of Cross-border E-commerce Comprehensive Pilot Zone On China’s Import And Export

International trade occupies an important position in China’s economic development and is an important driving force for economic growth,transformation,and upgrading.However,the global economic growth rate has slowed down in recent years,and the international situation has become increasingly complex.China’s traditional import and export trade has been greatly affected,and the growth rate has also slowed down.In this context,the new business model of cross-border e-commerce(CEBC)relying on “Internet+ Trade” has developed rapidly,and has gradually become a new growth point of China’s international trade.In relevant policy practice,the establishment of the China Cross-border E-commerce Comprehensive Pilot Zone(CEPZ)is highly representative,which is a collection of policies,technologies,and comprehensive institutional innovation with multiple advantages,encouraging the development of CEBC and regional trade growth in the policy region from many aspects.Since 2015,the State Council has approved seven batches of CEPZs,and by the end of 2022,there were 165 CEPZ,covering 31 provinciallevel administrative regions in China.Based on this background,this paper takes the CEPZ as the research object and evaluates the impact of this policy on China’s imports and export.This paper is conducted through a combination of theoretical analysis and empirical study.In the theoretical analysis part,based on the theory of trade facilitation and the theory of industrial agglomeration,this paper analyzes the direct and indirect effects of CEPZs on trade and describes the role path.In the empirical analysis part,this paper constructs a citymonth panel data which covers 75 cities nationwide from 2013 to 2020.We took the establishment of CEPZs as a quasi-natural experiment,and use the multi-period differencein-difference method to estimate the effect on import and export.Cities having CEPZs are the experimental group,and the cities without CEPZs are the comparison group.We compare the import and export between these two groups,before and after the establishment of CEPZs.The empirical results show that the establishment of the CEPZs will significantly promote trade in the pilot cities,of which the export value,according to the location of the commodity business unit,will increase by 10.4%,and the import value,according to the commodity destination,will increase by 14.7%.However,the impact on the import value according to the location of the commodity business unit and the export value according to the source of the commodity is modest.This implies that CEPZs have had a positive impact on the development of cross-border e-commerce,but limited impacts on the production and/or supply section of export goods.Further analysis shows that the role of CEPZs has become more salient after the outbreak of the COVID epidemic,and policy has a greater impact on non-border cities.Based on these results,we suggest that in the next stage,the relevant policies of CEBC should be gradually transferring the targets towards the production and/or supply section of export goods,and accelerating the expansion of the advanced experience obtained in the CEPZs to other cities,to promote the high-quality and coordinated development of the whole ecological chain of CEBC and provide more powerful support for accelerating the construction of a trade power.