A Study on Guangdong Province Foreign Trade Business Environment Evaluation and Optimization Research

Abstract

By constructing a comprehensive evaluation system for Guangdong’s foreign trade business environment based on the annual data from 2015 to 2019, factor analysis and entropy weight method are adopted to analyze Guangdong’s foreign trade business environment in recent years. This study discusses the aspects that the government should focus on in order to improve the foreign trade business environment more effectively. The results of the study are as follows: first, the overall differences in the foreign trade business environment of the Pearl River Delta urban agglomeration are small, and the cities play an important role in improving the foreign trade business environment; second, the foreign trade business environment is not fully constrained by economic development, so the foreign trade business environment can be more advanced than the city’s economic level and serve as the impetus for economic growth; third, there has been an improvement in how the attractiveness of foreign capital influences the foreign trade business environment. The Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP) agreement should be implemented in local cities, in order to construct an institutional framework of fair competition, enhance the transparency of investment barriers, and strengthen the protection of foreign investors’ rights.