The Impact of Cultural Distance and Proximity Effect on China's Service Trade Exports

This paper measures the cultural distance index between China and 86 service trade target countries from 2005 to 2019, and incorporates the “neighbor effect” into the analysis framework of cultural distance and service trade exports, and examines the impact of cultural distance, neighbor effect and the interaction between the two on China's service trade exports. The results show that cultural distance significantly affects service trade exports and there is regional heterogeneity, and countries along the “Belt and Road” are negatively affected by it, while countries not along the route are the opposite. After further introduction of the neighbor effect, it is found that China's service trade exports to a country are positively affected by the trade between China and its neighbors. The cultural distance will weaken the impact of neighbor effect on service trade. For this, International service trade should pay attention to cultural issues and implement targeted cultural policies according to the facts, that is, when trading with countries along the line, it should “seek the same culture” and “have cultural differences” when trading with countries not along the line. At the same time, it should also pay attention to the economic and trade cooperation in neighboring regions to better achieve mutual benefit and win-win results. 本文基于Hofstede文化六维度指标数据测算了2005-2019年间中国与86个服务贸易 对象国间的文化距离指数, 分析其对中国服务贸易出口的影响, 并将空间邻近思想 纳入实证分析模型, 进一步考察相邻效应和文化距离与相邻效应的交互项在中国服 务贸易出口中所起的作用。研究结果表明: 第一, 文化距离是影响中国服务贸易出口的重要因素。文化距离在绝大多数回归 模型中均通过了显著性检验, 其影响系数的绝对值仅次于经济规模和地理距离, 无论在范围还是强度上, 文化距离对中国服务贸易出口都有重要影响。第二, “相邻效应”在中国服务贸易出口实践中的影响得到证实。第三, 文化距离会弱化相邻效应对服务贸易出口的影响。第四, 传统贸易引力模型在服务贸易领域总体适用