Riassunto analitico
The “One Belt, One Road” initiative , is one of the largest and ambitious development policy announced in 2013 by Chinese president Xi Jinping,. Basically, the purpose of OBOR is to create a “win-win cooperation” environment by promoting the free flows of economic factors, the cost-efficient allocation of resources and the creation of integrated market, stimulating the countries involved to jointly establish an open, inclusive and balanced regional economic cooperation area led by mutual benefit criteria. The focus of this thesis is to study the determinates of trade relations between China and Europe. For this purpose, a panel data analysis has been conducted based on the gravity model approach. The estimators used are the two steps Fixed Effect model and OLS model. The European countries considered are 31, in a time frame from 1997 to 2016. Four databases have been developed to better capture the incidence of the regressors on each trade flows, the total trade has been disaggregated mainly into total Chinese Export, total Chinese Import, than a deeply investigation has been implemented on the sectorial division of the trade flows. Particularly, the export/import activities have further been disaggregated into: Primary products sector, Manufactured products sector and Intermediate product sector. As concern the scission related the last two sectors, has been implemented following the criteria adopted by the WTO statistical review, in order to investigate about the impacts of the OBOR strategy on the Intermediate products sector, since it accounts for more than 30 percent of the total imports and exports flows. Moreover, another reason to investigate about this field, concerns the recent prominent role of China in the Global Value Chain, where intermediate products are shipped to China to be processed and afterward are re-exported to developed countries The main variables used, in addition to the basic gravity model variables, can be grouped into: transport infrastructure quality, trade costs and control dummy. The main conclusions derived are: The chinese trade flows is positively affected by the quality of the port infrastructure while it is negatively affected by the transportation costs among the trade costs.
Afterwards, an analysis related to the trade potential has been employed to examinate the likely effects of an hypotetical reduction in transport cost, due the OBOR’s improvements in transport infrastructure, on the trade relations between China and Europe. To conduct this examination has been employed the speed of convergence method , and two scenarios have been simulated .the first without reduction ( using the coefficients estimated in FE models), the second with the reduction of 20 % in transport cost. Once , inspected which are the most potential countries in the two scenarios, a comparison between them ( specifically between trade potentials in the two scenarios) has been carried out to determine which partner’scountry could gain more or less as a results of the OBOR projects.
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