Abstract: Regional trade agreements are not only an important driving force for China to promote high-level opening-up and achieve high-quality economic development, but also a key factor to stabilize trade development and ensure economic recovery in times of crisis. Taking the 2008 global financial crisis as the research context, this paper focuses on the impact of the regional trade agreements signed and brought into effect before the crisis on the export resilience of Chinese enterprisesand its mechanism. The results show that regional trade agreements are the important reason for the enhancement of the export resilience of enterprises, and this conclusion is still valid after the robustness test and the endogeneity treatment. The results of a function mechanism show that reducing corporate export risks and improving the quality of export products are important channels for regional trade agreements to enhance the export resilience of enterprises. The heterogeneity analysis reveals that regional trade agreements are more conducive to enhancing the export resilience of the older firms with higher financing constraints. Further research shows that compared with the degree of export recovery, regional trade agreements can play a stronger role in promoting the degree of risk resistance of enterprises. Based on the above empirical results, it is suggested that the government should further promote the process of regional economic integration, and enterprises can take the destination country of regional trade agreement as their important export markets, so as to reduce the negative effect resulted from external impact as far as possible. In addition, it is also necessary to fully consider the different impacts of regional trade agreements on different enterprises, so as to effectively enhance the export resilience of enterprises.

Key words: regional trade agreement, enterprise export resilience, export risks, export product quality