Trade Potential Analysis between China and Europe under 'the Belt and Road' Initiative

摘要

Recently, the European market has become an indispensable part of Chinese foreign trade. In 2013, China put forward "the Belt and Road" initiative in order to communicate the Eurasian Continent. There has been 24 European countries joining in "the Belt and Road" initiative while most developed countries of the EU still stayed on the sidelines. This paper selects the data of total export-import volume between China and some European trade partners from 2007 to 2016 and divides these countries into two control groups that one group has been in "the Belt and Road" initiative and another not. I use RCA to explore our own comparative advantages. On that basis, the paper is aimed at seeking new trade potential between China and Europe by creating new Gravity Model so that we can look forward to the trend of "the Belt and Road" initiative to Europe in the future. After empirical analysis, we can see that China has many comparative advantages and new trade potentials were created under "the Belt and Road" initiative so that we need to develop complementary based on our own advantages and make full use of the B&R initiative to find further trade potentials with Europe. Former researches were mainly about China-EU's trade relations and situations and this paper focuses on the trade potential between China and Europe under "the Belt and Road" initiative.