英文摘要 |
There are significant structural shifts in container flows across the Taiwan Strait since the launch of direct shipping between Taiwan and Mainland China in the end of 2008. The purpose of this paper is aiming to identify the main driving forces for the growth of Taiwan's international container throughput via (1) the impact analysis of relaxing trade regulations between Taiwan and China since 1990 up to now, and (2) applying general theories to examine the impact of the establishment of cross-strait direct shipping link on the growth of Taiwan's container throughput from December 2008 up to now. This paper creates two time-related dummy variables to explore the impacts of'unilateral" import trade constraint and the relaxing'bilateral" cross-strait shipping regulations on the growth of Taiwan's container throughput in the past two decades. The result shows that (i) relaxing cross-strait trade regulations resulting in gradual rising import-export trade volume which has a positive impact on the growth of Taiwan's international container throughput, and (ii) the demand elasticity and constant return to scale of cross-strait trade (including export and import) to container throughput growth are found to be statistically significant only during 1990-2001, but no significant impact is found in the period of 2002-2012. We conclude that gradually relaxing cross-strait import regulations was a correct and fair policy for both Taiwan and China between 1990 and 2001. However, the impact of direct shipping link and cross-strait economic cooperation negotiations after 2002 should be further examined in the future. Finally, the growth of industrial GDP has positive impact and the fluctuating oil price has a negative impact on the growth of Taiwan's container throughput during 2004 to 2012. |