Turning One's Loss Into a Win? The US Trade War With China in Perspective

Zhiming Long, Zhixuan Feng, Bangxi Li and Rémy Herrera

A chapter in Value, Money, Profit, and Capital Today, 2023, vol. 39, pp 31-50 from Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Abstract: This chapter aims to shed light on the hidden benefits and losses of US-China trade within the framework of unequal exchange theory. After presenting the evolutions of the trade balance between China and the United States, we propose two methods for measuring the unequal exchange between them: one considers the labor content directly incorporated into the exchange; the other focuses on the international values with input-output tables. This allows to present a synthesis of sectoral analyses. Our results show a significant unequal exchange in US-China trade over 1995–2014, the United States being actually the main beneficiary of this trade. Both methods exhibit the inequality in exchange tending to decrease over time; China's disadvantage has been gradually reducing from the 2000s. We finally suggest that the relative decline in the hegemonic status of the United States in this bilateral unequal relationship could help explain its decision to launch its trade war with China.

Keywords: International trade; trade war; unequal exchange; Marxism; labor value; input-output table (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2023
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (text/html)
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... 1-723020230000039003
https://www.emerald.com/insight/content/doi/10.110 ... d&utm_campaign=repec (application/pdf)
Access to full text is restricted to subscribers

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:eme:rpeczz:s0161-723020230000039003

DOI: 10.1108/S0161-723020230000039003

Access Statistics for this chapter

More chapters in Research in Political Economy from Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Emerald Support ().