中国省际贸易流量与贸易壁垒研究

Research on Inter-provincial Trade Estimation and Trade Barriers of China

以要素市场一体化为基础的低生产成本是我国过去40多年的核心竞争优势,而以产品市场一体化为基础的规模经济将成为我国未来20年的新竞争优势。本文从省际贸易规模和壁垒的角度研究构建统一国内大市场、发挥超大规模经济优势问题。本文估算了1992—2019年26个部门的省际贸易流量,结果显示:省际流出贸易规模从1.24万亿元上升到61.47万亿元;省际流出贸易占全国总流出贸易的比例呈现先上升后下降的趋势,从前期的16%上升到2012年的23%,再下降到2019年的16%;边界效应和省际贸易成本两个指标的计算也显示省际贸易壁垒呈现先下降后上升的变化模式,且不同省份之间差距较大。参考Tombe&Zhu(2019)的初步分析表明,如果省际贸易成本从现有的1.775下降到1.491,将使得2017年的省际贸易比例从19.5%上升到29.8%,增长53%。本文的研究对理解中国国内大市场建设提供了一些较为重要的基础性成果。

China has impressed the world with an enviable development trajectory over the past four decades since the reform and opening-up.With its GDP reaching CNY 114 trillion,exports accounting for 15.1%of the world’s total,and value added of the manufacturing industry accounting for 29.8%in 2021,China has gained strong momentum economically and in terms of overall national strength.At the same time,with a lack of new driving forces,prominent structural imbalances in various dimensions,and an increasingly complex economic landscape worldwide,an emerging bottleneck is getting in the way for China’s economic development.Solving these problems would facilitate China’s economy to turn to high-quality development path in the future.In the past four decades since the reform and opening-up,with the liberalization of labor market,the competitiveness of China’s products has been greatly enhanced by virtue of the relatively low factor costs.While further liberalization leads to less marginal benefit from the promotion of factor mobility.Therefore,by establishing a unified domestic market to generate effects of economies of scale and utilize the complete industrial chains,China could be able to leverage the advantage of super economy to reduce product costs and improve the competitiveness of the products.Given the probability of innovation success,expected return of R&D investments will increase drastically as long as a unified domestic market is established,which shapes a sound climate that encourages firms to embrace innovation,research and development.And finally the economic growth will be driven more by innovation.Therefore,the construction of a unified domestic market and the promotion of domestic economy hold the key to China’s ambition of moving towards to high-quality economic development mode.The low production cost based on factor market integration forms the core competitiveness of China in the past four decades,while economies of scale based on product market integration will become a new competitive edge of China in the future.From the perspective of inter-provincial trade scale and trade barriers,this paper focuses on the issue that how to construct a unified domestic market and to give full play to the advantages of China’s super economy,which facilitates China to realize sustainable development.On the basis of existing research,this paper estimates China’s inter-provincial trade flows,which cover 26 sectors and 28 provincial regions(hereinafter referred to as provinces)from 1992 to 2019,through method discussion,data collection,unified department classification,data processing and other steps.The results show that the scale of inter-provincial trade flows,on the whole,increased from CNY 1.24 trillion to CNY 61.47 trillion from 1992 to 2019.The proportion of inter-provincial trade flows out of the total trade flows,which includes inter-provincial outflow,intra-provincial trade as well as export,increased from 16%to 23%in 2012 and then reduced to 16%in 2019.And this proportion varied vastly among provinces,with a range of 8%to 30%.Next,this paper gives an in-depth discussion of inter-provincial trade barriers from the perspectives of administrative boundary effects and inter-provincial trade costs.The results show that the administrative boundary effects firstly decreased from 2.7 in 1997 to 2.0 in 2007 and then increased to 2.5 in 2017;and the trade costs firstly decreased from 2.1 in 1997 to 1.7 in 2007 and then increased to 2.0.There are also great differences in administrative boundary effects and trade costs among different provinces.And trade barriers also varied drastically among provinces.In recent years,inter-provincial trade barriers in China tend to rise,which is detrimental to the integration of the domestic market.According to the preliminary analysis of Tombe&Zhu(2019),a 16%reduction(decreasing from 1.775 to 1.491)of inter-provincial trade costs leads to the proportion of inter-provincial trade increasing from 20%to 34%in 2017,which promotes the scale of inter-provincial trade by 70%.This paper provides an important foundation for the in-depth understanding of the construction of a unified domestic market.This paper has considerable research value.First,by making a relatively standard estimation of the inter-provincial trade data by province and sector in long sequence of years,this paper provides the basis for subsequent research on China’s unified domestic market construction and new development pattern with domestic economy as the mainstay.Second,it analyzes in detail the U-shaped changes of inter-provincial trade barriers and the evolution across regions and industries in the past three decades,which provides reference for conducting relevant research and formulating appropriate policies to form a more robust domestic market.Third,preliminary analysis in this paper optimistically forecasts the prospects of lowering inter-provincial barriers benefiting market integration and promoting domestic economy,which provides a preliminary basis for leveraging the scale advantage of China’s super economy.