5.1 Major Findings and Conclusions
Language is a tool for people to interact and communicate with each other.Dialects as a representation of culture,especially verbal communication,can have animportant impact on trade.Within the same linguistic region,people usuallycommunicate well,whereas between different linguistic regions there are oftenbarriers to communication.Uneven regional development is an important feature ofChina’s economic development,and there are many factors that lead to unevenregional development,one of which is the large differences in the degree of opennessof China’s regions to the outside world since the reform and opening up.Based on theinvestigation of theoretical models,the paper analyzes the intrinsic characteristics ofdialect distance or heterogeneity acting on foreign trade and its mechanisms based oncross-cultural business communication and language acquisition(bilingualism,common foreign language:English),using a variety of econometric analysis methods,and makes an extension and deepening.
The systematic empirical examination has led to the following main conclusions:the negative impact of the overall and categorical dialect distance;the regulation ofdialect diversity;the discussion of the classification of urban heterogeneity;and theinduction and justification of the mechanisms.The second of these focuses on themoderating effect of dialect diversity on the economic openness of regions similar toprefecture-level municipalities.At the empirical level,the dialect differentiation indexis used as a proxy for dialect diversity;from external dialect distance(i.e.regionalcommon dialects)as well as from internal dialect distance(i.e.geographicallyconvenient dialects)within a provincial region,the foreign trade dependency is usedas a proxy for external economic opening,chiefly because it is more focused on thespatio-temporal element than foreign investment dependency,which is clearly limitedby it in the process of international trade,and is also more applicable to the gravitymodel.Starting from the coefficient of variation statistics,the spatio-temporalevolution and heterogeneity of the degree of foreign economic openness of 257prefecture-level cities in China(unbalanced panel data)are analyzed,taking intoaccount the practical needs of econometric methods,such as the moderating effect andthe application of instrumental variables in the influence of dialectal distance onregional economic openness.
reference(omitted)
