| With global multilateral trade liberalization being hampered,regional trade agreements(RTAs)have gradually become an important means for economies to carry out economic strategies and cooperation.Since the 17 th Party Congress,China has attached great importance to the construction of RTA network and elevated the development of FTAs to the level of national strategy.The 20 th National Congress of the Communist Party of China also pointed out that we should expand the institutional opening of rules,regulations,management,standards and other systems.Participation in regional trade agreements has become an indispensable part of China’s opening up.At the same time,the status of imports in China’s foreign trade is receiving more and more attention,and General Secretary Xi Jinping has repeatedly stressed on different occasions the strategic importance of proactively expanding imports.Based on this,it is of great theoretical and practical significance to study the impact of RTA signatures and their depth on the binary margin of China’s imports.This paper takes the signed RTAs of China from 2003 to 2020 as the research object,and constructs various indicators to measure the depth of RTA clauses by using the data from the World Bank’s RTA text depth database,and thoroughly explores the impact of RTA clause depth on the binary margin of China’s imports.This paper analyzes the mechanism of the depth of RTA provisions affecting the binary margin of China’s imports through two paths: trade costs and institutional distance,and carries out the empirical analysis of this paper by constructing a "single-country gravity model",conducting benchmark regressions on the depth of RTA provisions affecting the intensive margin and the extensive margin of China’s imports,conducting robustness analysis by replacing explanatory variables and instrumental variables,and subsequently conducting mechanism tests,moderating effect analysis and heterogeneity tests.The empirical results show that(1)the impact of the improvement of the depth index of each clause on China’s import intensive margin shows a significant positive contribution,and the impact on China’s import extensive margin is not significant.After taking into account the legal compulsion of terms,the results are basically consistent with the baseline regression results.(2)Mechanism analysis shows that reducing bilateral trade costs and shrinking institutional distance among member countries are important channels through which the increase in the depth of RTA provisions promotes the growth of China’s import intensive margin.At the same time,the increase in the flexibility of RTA will weaken the promotion effect of the increase in the depth of RTA provisions on the import intensive margin.(3)The further heterogeneity analysis shows that the improvement of the depth of RTA clauses has a significant promoting effect on the intensive margin of imports from developing economies and developed economies,but has no significant impact on the import extensive margin from developed economies.It also has a significant inhibiting effect on the import extensive margin from developing economies.Furthermore,The increase in the depth of RTA clauses has no significant impact on the extensive margin of agricultural imports and the intensive margin of agricultural products,but it can significantly promote the growth of the intensive margin of industrial imports.The coredepth index and the "WTO+" depth index can significantly inhibit the growth of the extensive margin of industrial imports.The findings of this paper provide certain ideas and suggestions for China to further promote the global FTA strategy in the new era,implement system-based opening,actively expand imports and reasonably select partner countries.This paper has made some innovations in the research perspective and research object,while this paper focuses on the depth of RTA provisions to further open the "black box" of RTAs,which has certain reference significance for China to promote RTA strategy in the future. |
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