This paper shows that the most efficient way for China to fulfill its committed import purchases from the United States under the Phase One trade agreement is to mimic the effect of an import subsidy. The effective subsidies would divert China’s agricultural imports from other countries. We find that this trade diversion is especially strong for Australia and Canada, followed by Brazil, Indonesia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam.
We examine whether firms over-report international trade to evade capital controls for foreign exchange arbitrage, by specifically testing whether the aggregate bilateral trade data gap between trading partners is positively (negatively) correlated with the exchange rate spread when the spread is positive (negative). At the disaggregated level, we also employ Benford’s law to detect trade data manipulations...
International trade depends on the effects of past trade policy and expectations of future trade policy. Disentangling these two forces is difficult, but the US-China trade relationship is ideally suited for study. A large, and largely unexpected, trade liberalization in 1980 kicked off a long, gradual expansion of Chinese exports to the United States. Until China’s accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, these low tariff rates were relatively easy to revoke, generating time-varying uncertainty over their future values.
Gift expenditures grow swiftly in rural China and may adversely affect people's welfare. While gift-giving helps to maintain social status and connections, gift competition may create a predicament: people must spend more and more to "keep up with the Joneses." As a result, the escalating gift expenses crowd out spending on other important consumption and become increasingly burdensome to people in rural areas, particularly to the poor.
Residential investment has been a key growth engine for China in the last two decades. Total housing investment grew from about 4 percent of GDP in 1997 to a peak of 15 percent of GDP in 2014, with residential investment accounting for more than two-thirds of it. Our analysis indicates that structural changes in the Chinese economy that led to rebalancing toward consumption...