Research On The Factors Influencing Trade Efficiency Of China’s Digital Service Export To RCEP Member Countries

In recent years,the wave of digital economy has swept the world,traditional service trade combined with big data,artificial intelligence and other digital technologies,giving rise to new trade patterns and new models,digital service trade has emerged and gradually become a new engine of global trade growth,and countries are gradually shifting the focus of trade to digital services.The scale of China’s digital services trade has continued to expand during the 13 th Five-Year Plan period,with the growth rate ranking among the top in the world,and China will continue to attach great importance to digital services trade and seek new opportunities for cooperation and development during the 14 th Five-Year Plan period.As an important regional trade agreement signed recently,RCEP clearly provides for the digital economy as an opportunity to empower the development of digital services trade in the region,which is a key area for China’s future trade development.Therefore,it is of great practical significance to deeply explore the potential of China’s digital service export trade to other member countries in the RCEP region based on trade non-efficiency factors and to seize the more convenient and efficient trade environment created by the RCEP agreement to enhance China’s competitive advantage in trade and promote high-quality development of digital service trade at the time of rapid development of digital economy,while building a high level of RCEP regional economic integration.This paper takes China’s digital service exports to RCEP member countries as the research object,analyzes the influencing factors of China’s digital service export to RCEP member countries by constructing a stochastic frontier gravity model,and further measures and evaluates the trade efficiency based on the empirical results.Firstly,the overview and current situation of China’s digital service exports to RCEP countries are reviewed and analyzed from four aspects: export scale,structure,and competitiveness and complementarity,and it is found that the competitiveness and complementarity of China’s digital service exports to RCEP countries are reflected in telecommunication services,while China has competitive disadvantages in other digital service sectors,and there is still much room to explore the trade potential.Secondly,this paper sorts out the relevant concepts and trade theories.Trade efficiency is the ratio of actual trade volume to ideal trade volume,and measures the inefficiency factors that prevent actual trade volume from reaching the theoretical trade maximum.This paper combines the provisions related to digital service trade in the RCEP agreement to divide the factors that affect the efficiency of digital service export trade between China and other RCEP member countries into natural and human factors,and analyze their mechanisms of action.Thirdly,on the basis of theoretical analysis,this paper constructs a stochastic frontier gravity model,selects China’s digital service exports to 14 RCEP member countries from 2001 to 2019 as a sample,and empirically analyzes the effects of the Internet level,communication level,intellectual property protection level,the proportion of service industry added value and other non-efficiency factors on the trade efficiency of China’s digital service export to RCEP member countries.The research results found that the gap between bilateral economic development levels,geographical distance and the presence of a common border are negatively correlated with digital service exports;while the population size of the export destination country and the presence of a common language are positively correlated with digital service exports.In the trade inefficiency model,Internet level,communication level,intellectual property protection level,value-added share of service industry,trade freedom and signing of FTA all significantly promote the trade efficiency of China’s digital service exports;while cultural distance and investment freedom will significantly hinder the trade efficiency of China’s digital service exports.In addition,the export efficiency of different digital service segments is affected by these factors to different degrees.Overall,the efficiency of China’s digital service exports to RCEP member countries is relatively low.Except for Singapore,the average trade efficiency from 2001 to 2019 was less than 0.2,indicating that China’s digital service exports to RCEP member countries are greatly hindered by non-efficiency factors in trade.Therefore,we should seize the strategic opportunity of digital economy brought by the RCEP agreement and strive to eliminate the barriers of non-efficiency factors to digital service trade.Finally,this article proposes policy recommendations for the future development of digital service trade in China by combining the impact of non-efficiency factors with the specific digital service rules and provisions of RCEP.