The Global Welfare Impact of China: Trade Integration and Technological Change

By Julian Di Giovanni, Jing Zhang, Andrei A Levchenko

March 1, 2012

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Julian Di Giovanni, Jing Zhang, and Andrei A Levchenko. The Global Welfare Impact of China: Trade Integration and Technological Change, (USA: International Monetary Fund, 2012) accessed November 21, 2024

Disclaimer: This Working Paper should not be reported as representing the views of the IMF.The views expressed in this Working Paper are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent those of the IMF or IMF policy. Working Papers describe research in progress by the author(s) and are published to elicit comments and to further debate

Summary

This paper evaluates the global welfare impact of China's trade integration and technological change in a quantitative Ricardian-Heckscher-Ohlin model implemented on 75 countries. We simulate two alternative productivity growth scenarios: a "balanced" one in which China's productivity grows at the same rate in each sector, and an "unbalanced" one in which China's comparative disadvantage sectors catch up disproportionately faster to the world productivity frontier. Contrary to a well-known conjecture (Samuelson, 2004), the large majority of countries in the sample, including the developed ones, experience an order of magnitude larger welfare gains when China's productivity growth is biased towards its comparative disadvantage sectors. We demonstrate both analytically and quantitatively that this finding is driven by the inherently multilateral nature of world trade. As a separate but related exercise we quantify the worldwide welfare gains from China's trade integration.

Subject: Economic growth, Exports, International trade, Labor, Production, Productivity, Sustainable growth, Trade balance, Wages

Keywords: China, Comparative advantage, East Asia, Export basket, Export share, Exports, Global, Growth scenario, International trade, Middle East, North Africa, Price level, Productivity, Productivity estimate, Productivity growth, S distance, Sectoral productivity, South Asia, Sustainable growth, Technology compare, Trade balance, Trade cost, Unbalanced growth, Wages, WP

Publication Details

Pages:

62
Volume:

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DOI:

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Issue:

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Series:

Working Paper No. 2012/079
Stock No:

WPIEA2012079
ISBN:

9781475502312
ISSN:

1018-5941

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