The Anatomy of China's Export Growth

By M. Amiti, Caroline Freund. 2008

442 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Decomposing China's real export growth, of over 500 percent since 1992, reveals a number of interesting findings. First, China's export structure changed dramatically, with growing export shares in electronics and machinery and a decline in agriculture and apparel. Second, despite the shift into these more sophisticated products, the skill content of China's manufacturing exports remained unchanged, once processing trade is excluded. Third, export growth was accompanied by increasing specialization and was mainly accounted for by high export growth of existing products (the intensive margin) rather than in new varieties (the extensive margin). Fourth, consistent with an increased world supply of existing varieties, China's export prices to the United States fell by an average of 1.5 percent per year between 1997 and 2005, while export prices of these products from the rest of the world to the United States increased by 0.4 percent annually over the same period.

Subfields: Economics and Econometrics, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/8bf14d9159e23e04a3f84893eae9b0549ada6515

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Citations in the corpus

Innovation capacity and economic development: China and India (2011, background): “However, there is a growing literature enquiring to what extent China’s growth in high-tech exports can truly reflect its improvement in innovation capacity (see, for instance, Amiti and Freund 2010; Blustein 1997; Feenstra and Wei 2010; Koopman et al. 2008).”
Can Developing Countries Gain from Defying Comparative Advantage? Distance to Comparative Advantage, Export Diversification and Sophistication, and the Dynamics of Specialization (2018, background): “…be largely attributed to processing activities (Naughton, 2007; Van Assche and Gangnes, 2010), the pattern of specialization of the Chinese economy is not based on equally sophisticated domestic technological capabilities (Yue and Hua, 2002; Schott, 2008; Amiti and Freund, 2012, Dai et al., 2016).”
The China Syndrome: Local Labor Market Effects of Import Competition in the United States (2013, background): “In particular, there is differentiation according to local labor market reliance on labor-intensive industries, in which China’s comparative advantage is pronounced (Amiti and Freund 2010).”
Export upgrading and growth: the prerequisite of domestic embeddedness (2013, result): “This would also seem to confirm the claims that processing trade systematically upwardly distorts the ‘true’ level of Chinese export sophistication (Amiti and Freund, 2010; Yao, 2009; Van Assche and Gangnes, 2010).”
Revisiting the employment impact of offshoring (2014, unknown): “imports of Chinese goods in an industry was strongly predicted by the comparative advantage that China held in that industry prior to entry (see Bloom, Draca and Van Reenen, 2011), a fact further supported by evidence from Amiti and Freund (2010) who show that three-quarters of the growth in Chinese”
The Role of Extensive and Intensive Margins and Export Growth (2007, unknown): “a comparative static approach and compare exports in one year with exports in some later year.(1) As we document below, our analysis shows that doing so misses a great deal of, albeit short-lived, export activity.”