An empirical analysis of the influencing factors of China’s copper ore imports based on the improved gravity model

According to UN Comtrade, USGS and Ministry of Natural Resources of the People’s Republic of China, China’s copper consumption and imports ranked first in the world from 2012 to 2017.Since 2017, China’s economic recoverable copper reserves have seen negative growth.China’s low level of copper resource security and the decline in economically recoverable reserves have led to an increasing dependence on foreign copper resources.Therefore, it is of great significance to explore the source of China’s copper imports and the key influencing factors in the process of trade for the formulation of copper import and export policies and the alleviation of China’s copper import pressure.Based on the traditional gravity model, this paper introduces population, GDP and other indicators to build a improved gravity model.At the same time, the volume of copper trade and other relevant data between China and Chile, Peru, Mongolia, Australia and Mexico from 2012 to 2017 are selected for econometric regression analysis.The results show that the most significant factors affecting China’s copper imports are the exporting country factors, i.e.the copper reserves in the exporting country, the copper output in the exporting country and the per capita copper consumption in the exporting country have a significant impact on China’s imports.Indirect factors in trade space are related to China’s copper imports, but the effect is not significant.