Abstract:

With the normalization of epidemic prevention and control, global economic recovery has become the main theme of today's world. As an important carrier of the "Belt and Road" interconnection between China and European countries, the China-Europe Express has played an irreplaceable role after the 2008 financial crisis and the new crown pneumonia in 2020. It is important to study the impact of the opening of the China-Europe Express on the growth of Sino-European trade. The importance has become increasingly prominent. This paper selects the country-level panel data of 36 European countries from 2006 to 2017, and uses the multi-period difference in difference method to empirically test the impact of the opening of the China-Europe express train on the growth of China-Europe trade. The main conclusions are as follows: first, the opening of the China-Europe express train has a positive effect on the growth of China-Europe trade, and the positive promotion effect of the opened countries is significantly greater than that of the non-open countries; second, in 2011—2017, the opening of the China-Europe express train will promote trade with European countries and the impact presents a dynamic trend feature of "first decline, then rise, then decline and then rise"; third, from the perspective of geographic location differences, the China-Europe Express has the strongest promotion effect on the trade growth of Central European countries, followed by Eastern European countries with the least impact of Nordic country; fourth, from the perspective of the role of the dual margin, the promotion of Sino-European trade growth comes from the dual margin of enterprises, that is, the growth of trade is achieved through the intensive margin and expansion margin of export companies.

Key words: One Belt One Road, China-Europe Express, China-Europe trade, trade growth, difference-in-difference