Trends and Features of China's Inter-Provincial Trade:1987-2007

With today's economic globalization,inter-provincial trade plays an important role in a country's economy.This paper is the first to adopt the input-output tables of 30 Chinese provinces and to summarize the evolution of China's inter-provincial trade from1987 to 2007.This paper reaches the following conclusions.First,China's inter-provincial trade has sustained a period of rapid growth.In 2007,the total volume of inter-provincial trade was twice the amount of international trade,with the eastern region accounting for the majority of the inter-provincial trade volume.GDP may have a greater effect on interprovincial trade than geographic distance does.Second,inter-provincial trade maintains a high level of concentration and overlaps with the high concentration of GDP.Third,the inter-provincial trade dependence of Chinese provinces tends to increase,an indication of the growing domestic market integration.Moreover,the eastern region's dependence on inter-provincial trade is higher than the central and western regions'.Fourth,the share of inter-provincial trade in the overall external trade of Chinese provinces has a declining tendency,which indicates a slower process of China's domestic market integration compared with international market integration.However,in terms of proportion,the external trade of most Chinese provinces is still dominated by inter-provincial trade.Fifth,most provinces with longstanding inter-provincial trade deficits are in the central and western regions.

Estimating Chinese Trade Relationships with the Silk Road Countries

In this paper we discuss the extent to which countries in the Jormer Silk Roaa regions are either reaching or failing to reach their trading potential with China. We estimate a gravity model of trade using a Poisson pseudo-maximum likelihood estimator, and estimate trade potential using in-sample, out-of-sample and counterfactual approaches. We compare trade potential using these three methods for Silk Road country trades with China. Next, we compare the estimated trade potential to actual trade, and find that most Silk Road countries are underperforming in their trade with China. However, trade performance against potential improved for most countries over the years 1990-2013. Our results suggest that China＇s former Silk Road trading partners have yet to realize the full potential benefits of China＇s economic growth but that the gap may be narrowing.