Trade-Policy Dynamics: Evidence from 60 Years of U.S.-China Trade

George Alessandria, Shafaat Khan, Armen Khederlarian, Kim Ruhl and Joseph Steinberg

No 29122, NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc

Abstract: We study the growth of Chinese exports to the United States, from autarky during 1950–1970 to 15 percent of overall U.S. imports in 2008, taking advantage of the rich heterogeneity in trade policy and trade growth across products during this period. Central to our analysis is an accounting for the dynamics of trade flows, observed trade policy, and expectations about future policy. In our empirical analysis, we estimate the dynamics of the elasticity of Chinese exports to (i) past tariff changes and (ii) the risk of future tariff hikes. We find that Chinese exports responded slowly to the tariff changes that occurred when China was granted Most Favored Nation status in 1980, and that policy uncertainty was more important in the immediate aftermath of this liberalization than in the lead-up to China’s 2001 accession to the World Trade Organization. It is difficult, however, to separately identify these two effects using data alone. In our quantitative analysis, we disentangle these effects by using a structural model to estimate a path of trade-policy expectations. We find that the 1980 reform was largely a surprise and initially had a high probability of being reversed. The likelihood of reversal dropped considerably during the mid 1980s but changed little throughout the late 1990s and early 2000s despite China’s accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001.

JEL-codes: F1 F14 F62 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2021-08
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cna, nep-cwa, nep-his, nep-int and nep-isf
Note: IFM ITI
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.nber.org/papers/w29122.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
Journal Article: Trade Policy Dynamics: Evidence from 60 Years of US-China Trade (2025)
Working Paper: Trade-Policy Dynamics: Evidence from 60 Years of U.S.-China Trade (2021)
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:nbr:nberwo:29122

Ordering information: This working paper can be ordered from
http://www.nber.org/papers/w29122

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in NBER Working Papers from National Bureau of Economic Research, Inc National Bureau of Economic Research, 1050 Massachusetts Avenue Cambridge, MA 02138, U.S.A.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by ().