Cultural distance and the structure of the Belt and Road trade network

With the development of science and technology, trade between countries has become more convenient, weakening the influence of geographical location on national trade and highlighting the importance of national cultural strength. This paper mainly studies the relationship between cultural distance and the Belt and Road trade network. We use the United Nations Trade Commodity Statistics Database (UN Comtrade) to collect relevant data and organize them. Based on the collated data, we establish a weighted trade network and use UCINET software to draw a network diagram, analyzing the structural characteristics of the trade network. We select the Hofstede cultural six-dimensional data of 66 Belt and Road member countries, adopt the KSI index method to measure the cultural distance of each country and construct the cultural distance matrix. Then the trade network matrix is combined with the cultural distance matrix for QAP correlation analysis. It is ultimately concluded that cultural distance has a negative impact on the volume of trade along the Belt and Road.