Taking Another Look at Policy Research on China's Accession to the World Trade Organization
Recent work on China's accession to the World Trade Organizations pays little attention to the wave of reforms in China in the 1980s and 1990s. These reforms created the preconditions for accession and strongly influenced its outcomes. The pre...
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| Language: | English |
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World Bank, Washington, DC
2019
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| Online Access: | http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/745641562006533245/Taking-Another-Look-at-Policy-Research-on-Chinas-Accession-to-the-World-Trade-Organization http://hdl.handle.net/10986/32032 |
| Summary: | Recent work on China's accession to
the World Trade Organizations pays little attention to the
wave of reforms in China in the 1980s and 1990s. These
reforms created the preconditions for accession and strongly
influenced its outcomes. The preeminence of processing trade
at the time of accession sharply reduced the impact of
accession-related tariff reductions on exports and set the
stage for China's increases in domestic value added and
reduction in China's involvement in global production
sharing since that time. The assessment in this paper, based
on export data and simulation results on the ex ante
accession-related effects on export volumes in the
literature, finds that the accession must have increased
China's real export growth by at most 6 percentage
points between 1997 and 2005. This effect is substantial,
but not as large as suggested by the difference between the
pre- and post-accession export growth rates in the four
years before and after accession. This is because the
influence of cyclical fluctuations related to the Asian
financial crisis and the U.S. dot-com crash dampened export
growth in the period before accession in 2001 and
accelerated it afterward. |
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