Intelligent evaluation of trade efficiency of agricultural products between China and ASEAN: An stochastic frontier approach with noise reduction

As the world’s largest free trade area among developing countries, the China-ASEAN Free Trade Area has gone through 15 years, and the China-ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) Free Trade Area cooperation framework with tariff reduction as the core has diminished incentive effects on regional trade, the “21st Century Maritime Silk Road” strategy provide new opportunities for the upgrading and development of the China-ASEAN Free Trade Area. Based on the stochastic frontier gravity model, the random disturbance term was introduced to overcome the inevitable noise problem of macro statistical data, the trade efficiency of agricultural products between China and ASEAN were estimated in this study. The result shows that the potential for trade promotion between China and ASEAN countries is fully tapped. Based on this, it is proposed to strengthen infrastructure construction and smooth maritime trade channels with the help of the “One Road” platform. Strengthen communication and dialogue to weaken the impact of non-tariff barriers on trade, and use the Shanghai Free Trade Zone test plot to enhance the international competitiveness of Chinese agricultural product trade.