Research on the Trade Effect of Asian Regional Trade Agreements Based on Propensity Score Matching

Based on the bilateral trade flow and RTA data of Asian countries from 1990 to 2010, this paper analyzes the effect of signing the regional trade agreement on RTA member countries' bilateral trade, export trade and import trade, and solves the heterogeneity issue of RTA in traditional gravity model. The result shows that signing the regional trade agreement will positively promote the bilateral total trade, export trade and import trade between member countries, and relieve the statistical errors caused by national feature variables(the over-estimating trade effect of RTA).