特惠贸易协定对出口复杂度的影响:基于中国的反事实分析

The Impact of Preferential Trade Agreement on Export Sophistication:A Counterfactual Analysis Based on China

本文研究了特惠贸易协定(PTA)对于缔约国出口复杂度的影响。本文首先通过扩展Hausmann等(2007)的成本发现模型,研究特惠贸易协定影响出口复杂度的理论机制,结果表明:特惠贸易协定可以通过降低贸易成本和降低政策不确定性两个渠道提高缔约国的出口复杂度;然后,本文以中国为例,运用倾向评分匹配法(PSM)进行了反事实经验分析,结果显示,特惠贸易协定对于中国向缔约国出口的复杂度具有显著的正向影响,并且PTA的合作程度越深,对出口复杂度的影响就越大;此外,本文还运用广义精确匹配法(CEM)和双重差分法(DID)进行了稳健性检验,进一步证实了PSM模型的估计结果。

This paper investigates the impact of Preferential Trade Agreements( PTAs) on export sophistication. Based on the cost discovery framework of Hausmann et al.( 2007),we develop a theoretical model,which predicts that PTAs can improve bilateral export sophistication between the member countries through reducing the trade costs and policy uncertainty. Then using the data from China,we conduct counterfactual analysis by means of Propensity Score Matching( PSM) technique. The empirical results show that PTAs have a significant and positive effect on China’s export sophistication.Further analysis shows that this effect is positively associated with the depth of the PTAs.A series of tests,including the Coarsened Exact Matching( CEM) and Difference in Differences( DD) estimation confirm the robustness of our findings.