Research on the relationship between foreign trade and the GDP growth of southwest minority region of China-empirical analysis based on the panel causality

In open economy, development of foreign trade greatly impacts GDP growth. Adapting modern metering methods like roots of unity, panel co-integration analysis and error correction model for researching the causalities between foreign trade including total foreign trade, total export and total import as well as GDP growth of southwest minority of China. The result suggests that there exist long time or short time causality between GDP and total foreign trade as well as between GDP and export, foreign trade is the long time and short time reason of GDP growth, but no evident can prove that there exists long time stable causality between foreign trade and GDP. This paper ends up with recommendations to develop the economy of southwest minority region of China.