双边关系与贸易保护——来自中国遭遇贸易壁垒的经验证据

Bilateral Relations and Trade Protection: Empirical Evidence from China’s Encounter with Trade Barriers

随着新制度经济学的兴起,越来越多的研究探讨了双边关系对国际贸易与投资的影响,而鲜有学者考察双边关系改善能否抑制贸易保护主义的发生。近年来,逆全球化动向不断加剧带来贸易保护主义层出不穷,为世界经济复苏与中国推进经济高质量发展带来更多的不稳定性与不确定性。与此同时,中国坚持推动构建人类命运共同体、推动构建新型国际关系的外交理念,切实增进与贸易伙伴国的政治互信并不断扩大务实合作,良好的双边关系为双边贸易发展巩固提质。对于双边关系改善能否抑制贸易伙伴国对中国发起贸易保护这一问题,作者基于国家间双边关系这一制度视角,选取2008年11月至2018年12月高频月度双边关系定量指标与各伙伴国贸易政策监控数据,构建计数面板模型进行分析。研究结果表明,良好的双边关系对抑制贸易保护有正向效应,与发达国家的双边关系对贸易保护的溢出效应大于与发展中国家关系的效应。随着贸易伙伴国正式制度质量的提高、两国间非正式制度距离的缩小以及中国国家形象的提升,双边关系改善对抑制保护主义的正向效应逐渐增强。

With the rise of new institutional economics,more and more studies have explored the impact of bilateral relations on international trade and investment from the institutional perspective,while few scholars have investigated whether bilateral relations can restrain the occurrence of trade protectionism. As deglobalization has been spreading recently, a new round of protectionism is surging around the world, bringing more instability and uncertainty to the recovery of the world economy and to China’s high-quality development. At the same time,China adheres to the diplomatic concept of promoting the building of a community with a shared future for mankind and promoting the building of a new type of international relations,to effectively enhance political mutual trust with partner countries and continuously expand practical cooperation.Good bilateral relations could “consolidate and improve quality”for the development of bilateral trade. In this regard, we conducted an in-depth study on whether the improvement of bilateral relations inhibits partner countries’ initiation of trade protection against China. In this paper,based on the institutional perspective of bilateral relations actively constructed between countries, we select the high-frequency monthly bilateral relations indicators from November 2008 to December 2018 and the monitoring data of each partner country’s trade policy to construct a counter panel data regression model.This paper finds that the improvement of bilateral relations has a positive effect on restraining trade protection,and that the spillover effect of bilateral relations with developed countries on trade protection is greater than the effect of relations with developing countries. And with the improvement of the quality of the formal institutions of partner countries,the shrinking of the informal institutional distance between the two countries and the improvement of China’s national image,the improvement of bilateral relations has gradually increased the effect of restraining protectionism.