| The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership(RCEP)is a free trade agreement initiated by the ASEAN countries and jointly participated by China,Japan,South Korea,Australia and New Zealand.The signing of the RCEP agreement marks the formal establishment of the world’s largest free trade area in terms of economic scale and trade potential.China,as one of the world’s major exporters of forest products,are provided with a wonderful opportunity to expand its export scale of wood forest products and release its export potential due to the establishment of RCEP.Other members of RCEP have become the core region for China’s trade in wood forest products of AsiaPacific region,which play a key role in improving the China’s competitiveness in wood forest products.Based on this,theoretical and empirical analyses were combined to study the competitiveness and influencing factors of China’s wood forest products exports to RCEP members.Firstly,the concepts of wood forest products and trade competitiveness were defined through literature research,and compiles relevant trade data with the help of UN Comtrade database to analyze the current situation of China’s exports of wood forest products to RCEP members in terms of trade scale,market structure and product structure.Secondly,four international competitiveness evaluation indexes,which are Market share index,Revealed Comparative Advantage,Trade Competitive Index and Trade Complementarity Index,were selected to evaluate the China’s competitiveness of wood forest products exports at the overall and classification levels.Thirdly,based on Porter’s "diamond model",the variables which influence China’s competitiveness of wood forest products exports were selected,then a multiple linear regression model was built to analyze the factors that influence the international competitiveness of China’s wood forest products.Finally,several suggestions were put forward to enhance China’s competitiveness in the exports of wood forest products to RCEP members according to the results of the international competitiveness index and the linear regression.This study finds that China has considerable potential in exporting wood forest products to RCEP members,and China’s wood forest product trade has a certain degree of international competitiveness in RCEP members,mainly reflected in processed wood products.The results of multiple regression show that the national economic lever,infrastructure,trade openness,agricultural and forestry production,and attitude towards forest protection of China positively contribute to the improvement of wood forest products export competitiveness.The domestic demand market,however,have a negative correlated with the competitiveness of wood forest product exports.Combined with the above conclusions,several countermeasures,which is increasing timber supply capacity,optimizing the forestry industry structure,enhancing port infrastructure construction,promoting mutual recognition of forest product certifications,and exploring the construction of industrial strategic alliances,were proposed to comprehensively enhance China’s competitiveness in the export of wood forest product to RCEP members. |
