Just passing through? The US-China trade war and reconfiguration of global value chains through Vietnam

Tao Zou and Yundan Gong

No 38, KCG Working Papers from Kiel Centre for Globalization (KCG)

Abstract: We examine how the 2018-19 US-China trade war reconfigured global value chains (GVCs) through Vietnam using firm-to-firm transaction records on cross-border trade and domestic sourcing. We find that exposure to US tariffs on Chinese goods led firms in Vietnam to increase imports from China and exports to the US, with both transshipment and value-added processing contributing along distinct timelines. Tracing domestic supply-chain responses within Vietnam, we show that US tariff hikes on China also increased local intermediate sourcing, but a substantial share of this expansion embodied Chinese intermediate inputs. The results provide firm-level evidence that trade-war-driven relocation of GVCs to Vietnam stimulated local processing activity while deepening Chinese supplychain linkages in the third country.

Keywords: Trade war; Reconfiguration; Local sourcing; Vietnam; GVCs; US; China (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F13 F14 F23 L14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2026, Revised 2026
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-iaf and nep-sea
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.econstor.eu/bitstream/10419/342501.2/1 ... er_38_update0826.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:zbw:kcgwps:342501

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in KCG Working Papers from Kiel Centre for Globalization (KCG)
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ZBW - Leibniz Information Centre for Economics ().