ZHANG Jun, CHEN Lei：The Effect of Cultural Heterogeneity on China's Export——Evidence from Main Trading Partners

Abstract：This paper introduces Mahalanobis Distance to measure cultural heterogeneity, constructs an extended gravity model in the frame of Anderson and van Wincoop(2003), applies first-order Taylor expansion proposed by Baier and Bergstand(2009)to control multilateral resistance, and then investigates how cultural heterogeneity impacts China's export trade. Main results are as follows.(1)Cultural factor plays an important role in China's export, and cultural heterogeneity has significantly negative influence on China's export. As cultural difference between China and trading partners gets more obvious, the export drops significantly.(2)Compared with high-income trading partners, cultural heterogeneity appears to exert a greater influence on low-income trading partners.(3)The impact of cultural heterogeneity on China's export varies significantly across product categories; cultural heterogeneity exerts more inhibiting effects on primary products compared with manufactured goods. The results of this paper imply that enhancing independence of export market, adjusting export structure, and improving relative information service of export enterprises have great significance for promoting export.

Key words： Cultural Heterogeneity    Chinas Export    Multilateral Resistance    Mahalanobis Distance

source:Finance & Trade Economics ,No.7,2015