Introduction
(I) Research Background
Since China joined the free trade zone, the traditional offline trade methods have been unable to meet the development of foreign trade under the new normal. Meanwhile, with the increasing popularity of the Internet, economic globalization and information network technology have gradually achieved integration, and cross-border e-commerce has realized the innovation of trade development mode and become the main competitiveness of international trade development.
At the end of 2012, cross-border e-commerce service pilots were established in Shanghai, Hangzhou, Ningbo and Guangzhou, and a dozen cities such as Shenzhen and Suzhou were added as cross-border e-commerce pilot cities in 2014, with Qingdao and Yantai in Shandong as among them, driving the development of cross-border e-commerce in Shandong and injecting new vitality into foreign trade in Shandong Province. 2015 saw the establishment of the China (Hangzhou) Comprehensive Cross-border E-commerce The pilot zone was promoted to increase the number of cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot zones to 12 in 2016, and Shandong Qingdao was listed among them.
With the improvement of policies and the active promotion of enterprises, Shandong gradually carried out cross-border e-commerce transactions and set up five provincial-level cross-border e-commerce comprehensive pilot zones, including Jinan, Yantai, Weihai, Rizhao and Weifang, in 2016, and the development of cross-border e-commerce in Shandong flourished.
(II) Research significance
On the one hand, this paper adopts an econometric analysis method to quantitatively analyze the impact of cross-border e-commerce on import and export trade under the new normal for relevant data in Shandong Province, and study the mutual change relationship among cross-border e-commerce, import trade and export trade, and analyze the intensity of the impact among them on this basis. The results of the analysis are helpful to improve the omissions of previous scholars’ studies.
On the other hand, the conclusions drawn from the analysis are beneficial to the government and enterprises in clarifying the important position of cross-border e-commerce in foreign trade, providing a basis for economic system reform and enterprise development direction, thus further promoting the steady improvement of import and export trade in Shandong Province.
(III) Innovation points and shortcomings
From the existing literature, the research on the impact of cross-border e-commerce on import and export trade is mainly from the national perspective, studying the overall domestic status quo, and there are also individual analyses on advanced provinces and cities, but there is no empirical analysis for the status quo of Shandong Province. The research in this paper fills the gap in this regard.
Difficulties in writing this paper: Since cross-border e-commerce has only emerged in recent years, the data on the relevant e-commerce websites are scattered and incomplete, and more efforts have been spent on data collection, and some data are obtained by my calculation.
Data sources
This paper studies the impact of cross-border e-commerce on import and export trade in Shandong Province, excluding the domestic trade part. The selected time series is the annual data from 2003 to 2016, and the sample size is 14. The data sources of each variable: the total import and export of Shandong Province are from the Shandong Province Statistical Yearbook, and the part of cross-border e-commerce transactions are from the website of China E-commerce Research Center. As there may be heteroskedasticity between the data, logarithmic processing is performed on the above data so as to achieve the stability of the time series, and the variables after logarithmic processing become LKJDS, LJK and LCK.
Modeling
(i) Data smoothness test and determination of lag order
1. Data smoothness test. In order to improve the accuracy of the regression results, the time series are first tested for smoothness. This paper uses the unit root test to test the smoothness of the three series. From the test results, we can see that: after the first-order difference, the ADF statistics of each variable is greater than 10% confidence level and less than 5% confidence level to achieve smoothness. Therefore, ?J is a stable first-order single integer time series for all variables with first-order difference values.
2. Selection of lagged order of VAR model. According to the AIC and SC criteria, the lag order of the unconstrained VAR model is selected. 4 out of 5 evaluation indicators show that the lag order that should be selected is 2, i.e., VAR (2) is established.
Data analysis
(i) Stability test and
From the test results, it is obtained that the inverse points of all root modes of the VARCK model for export trade and VARJK model for import trade are within the unit circle, so it is judged that both models are stable.
(II) Impulse response function analysis and variance decomposition
1. Impulse response function analysis. From the analysis results, it can be seen that when a positive shock is given to cross-border e-commerce transactions in the current period, the import trade of Shandong Province will show up and down fluctuations in the short term, and the growth of import trade reaches a positive maximum in the second period and then starts to converge. This indicates that cross-border e-commerce transactions have a certain lag effect on import trade in the short term, and cross-border e-commerce will bring an obvious driving effect on import trade in Shandong Province in the short term, but the effect will be relatively weakened in the long term. A positive response is formed in the first period only in the fourth period, a negative response is formed in the fourth to the sixth period, and a positive response to the growth of import trade is formed continuously from the sixth period onwards, but the degree of response gradually weakens. This indicates that a positive shock of cross-border e-commerce has a greater impact on import trade in the short term and has a certain volatility, and overall, cross-border e-commerce has a positive driving effect on import trade in Shandong Province.
When a positive shock is given to cross-border e-commerce transactions in this period, export trade in Shandong province will be more volatile in the short term, reaching a positive maximum in the second period and forming a maximum negative response in the fifth period. However, from the seventh period onwards cross-border e-commerce forms a continuous positive response to export trade again. Thus, it can be seen that although the impact of cross-border e-commerce on export trade growth is more volatile in the short term, it has a positive driving effect on export trade in the long term.
2. Variance decomposition analysis. Through variance decomposition, we find that in the import and export trade of Shandong Province, in addition to its own influence, the development of cross-border e-commerce also has a greater impact on it, but through comparative analysis, the role played by e-commerce in export trade is greater than its impact on import trade, mainly because export trade is mainly large-scale overseas marketing by trade enterprises with a relatively large share, while e-commerce in import trade is mainly applied to individual consumers’ sea-trade, proxy shopping, etc., the share is relatively small.
Policy recommendations
First, strengthen the awareness of e-commerce and promote the integration of e-commerce and import and export trade. The government should fully understand the importance of cross-border e-commerce, formulate and improve relevant preferential policies, deepen the scope of its application in import and export trade, and promote the upgrading of foreign trade in Shandong.
Second, establish and improve the international logistics system to meet the demand of import and export trade. Fully relying on Qingdao port, Rizhao port and other seaport ports, open up international logistics channels for cross-border e-commerce and strengthen the construction of infrastructure for international logistics. Take advantage of trade logistics with Korea and make full use of the China-Korea e-commerce channel.
Third, increase the training of cross-border e-commerce talents and improve professional quality. Firstly, enterprises, colleges and universities, industry associations and social training institutions should be actively guided to carry out course training in the field of cross-border e-commerce and train cross-border e-commerce talents in a targeted manner to meet market demand. Secondly, attention should be paid to the introduction of outstanding overseas cross-border e-commerce talents and the formulation of reasonable supporting measures for the introduction of talents.
Conclusion
The development of cross-border e-commerce in Shandong Province is the general trend. With the progress of information network technology, Shandong Province’s foreign trade will vigorously introduce e-commerce, and cross-border e-commerce will become the development trend of import and export trade in the province.
Cross-border e-commerce and Shandong Province’s import and export trade have a mutual influence role. In the existing literature, scholars have studied the one-way relationship between the two. In this paper, the interaction between the two is confirmed by vector autoregressive model in the quantitative analysis, and countermeasures are proposed for the development of cross-border e-commerce in our province.