Abstract: By employing the K-M method, this paper estimates the survival time and survival rate of China’s export trade products and the classfied products. Meanwhile, it adopts the discrete time probit, logit, cloglog models to study the effect of CAFTA on China’s export trade duration, and then it tests the effect in terms of the returns to scale and the degrees of differentiation. The results show that the median value and the mean value of China’s export time duration are rather shorter. The member country effect of CAFTA is in the opposite direction to the establishment effect; however, both the effects are significant and then have passed the robustness test. The member country effect of different classfied products is different from the significance of the establishment effect, and the directions of the final gross effect are also inconsistent. Therefore, we should pay close attention to the free trade area effects of export duration and the different effects of all kinds of classfied products when adjusting the export trade policy.

Key words: duration; survival analysis; CAFTA; discrete time model