Friday, May 26, 2017

Global Economy - Without China’s opening-up to global trade, the productivity slowdown that started before the financial crisis of 2008–2009 would have been even sharper..

Publication -  How Trade with China Boosts Productivity  - By JaeBin Ahn and Romain Duval

Advocates of protectionist policies in advanced economies blame job losses on growing trade with China, and influential researchers have provided some empirical backing for their claims. Yet the benefits of trade with China are often overlooked. Among them is faster growth in productivity—the key driver of improved living standards. 

This suggests that rather than erecting new barriers to trade, advanced economies should continue to open up—while doing much more to help those who have lost their jobs to overseas competition.

Our new research shows that for advanced economies:

Productivity growth has been faster in countries and industries that have been more exposed to China’s opening to trade, all else equal; and

As much as 12 percent of the increase in productivity over the 12 years from 1995 through 2007 can be attributed to China’s integration into world trade.

Trade improves productivity in three important ways. First, imports expose domestic firms to greater competitive pressure, while giving them access to more and better inputs. Second, exporters increase productivity by learning from overseas customers and through exposure to competition from foreign producers. Third, alongside productivity gains within firms, trade fosters reallocation of resources between firms, toward the most productive.

Our research quantifies all three gains simultaneously, using data on productivity and employment as well as exports (by destination country) and imports (by source country) for 18 manufacturing and non-manufacturing sectors across 18 advanced countries. The sectors we studied were in broad categories such as textiles, and transportation equipment.

Slow recovery

Trade with China grew steadily between the mid-1990s and the mid-2000s, then declined as a result of the global financial crisis, and has recovered only slowly since then, particularly on the import side. We calculated that those exports and imports may have accounted for about 1.9 percent out of the total 15.6 percent rise in total factor productivity—the overall productivity of both labor and capital, which reflects such elements as technology—in the typical sector in advanced economies from 1995 to 2007. This is a large figure—about 12 percent of the total productivity increase in the typical sector. Also, we estimate that exposure to Chinese imports and access to China’s market each contributed about half of this gain.

The flip side of these productivity gains, however, has been net job losses. We found that job losses in advanced economies resulting from rising imports from China more than offset gains from growing exports to China. The result: net job losses of about 0.8 percent of total employment for the typical sector over the period 1995–2007.



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