Publication:
U.S.-Japan and U.S.-China Trade Conflict : Export Growth, Reciprocity, and the International Trading System

Loading...
Thumbnail Image
Files in English
English PDF (620.61 KB)
968 downloads
English Text (127.43 KB)
167 downloads
Published
2009-10-01
ISSN
Date
2012-03-19
Author(s)
McCulloch, Rachel
Editor(s)
Abstract
First Japan and more recently China have pursued export-oriented growth strategies. While other Asian countries have done likewise, Japan and China are of particular interest because their economies are so large and the size of the associated bilateral trade imbalances with the United States so conspicuous. In this paper the authors focus on U.S. efforts to restore the reciprocal GATT/WTO market-access bargain in the face of such large imbalances and the significant spillovers to the international trading system. The paper highlights similarities and differences in the two cases. The authors describe U.S. attempts to reduce the bilateral imbalances through targeted trade policies intended to slow growth of U.S. imports from these countries or increase growth of U.S. exports to them. They then examine how these trade policy responses, as well as U.S. efforts to address what were perceived as underlying causes of the imbalances, influenced the evolution of the international trading system. Finally, the authors compare the macroeconomic conditions associated with the bilateral trade imbalances and their implications for the conclusions of the two episodes.
Link to Data Set
Citation
McCulloch, Rachel; Bown, Chad P.. 2009. U.S.-Japan and U.S.-China Trade Conflict : Export Growth, Reciprocity, and the International Trading System. Policy Research working paper ; no. WPS 5102. © World Bank. http://hdl.handle.net/10986/4303 License: CC BY 3.0 IGO.
Associated URLs
Associated content
Report Series
Report Series
Other publications in this report series
  • Publication
    Global Poverty Revisited Using 2021 PPPs and New Data on Consumption
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-06-05) Foster, Elizabeth; Jolliffe, Dean Mitchell; Lara Ibarra, Gabriel; Lakner, Christoph; Tettah-Baah, Samuel
    Recent improvements in survey methodologies have increased measured consumption in many low- and lower-middle-income countries that now collect a more comprehensive measure of household consumption. Faced with such methodological changes, countries have frequently revised upward their national poverty lines to make them appropriate for the new measures of consumption. This in turn affects the World Bank’s global poverty lines when they are periodically revised. The international poverty line, which is based on the typical poverty line in low-income countries, increases by around 40 percent to $3.00 when the more recent national poverty lines as well as the 2021 purchasing power parities are incorporated. The net impact of the changes in international prices, the poverty line, and new survey data (including new data for India) is an increase in global extreme poverty by some 125 million people in 2022, and a significant shift of poverty away from South Asia and toward Sub-Saharan Africa. The changes at higher poverty lines, which are more relevant to middle-income countries, are mixed.
  • Publication
    The Macroeconomic Implications of Climate Change Impacts and Adaptation Options
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-05-29) Abalo, Kodzovi; Boehlert, Brent; Bui, Thanh; Burns, Andrew; Castillo, Diego; Chewpreecha, Unnada; Haider, Alexander; Hallegatte, Stephane; Jooste, Charl; McIsaac, Florent; Ruberl, Heather; Smet, Kim; Strzepek, Ken
    Estimating the macroeconomic implications of climate change impacts and adaptation options is a topic of intense research. This paper presents a framework in the World Bank's macrostructural model to assess climate-related damages. This approach has been used in many Country Climate and Development Reports, a World Bank diagnostic that identifies priorities to ensure continued development in spite of climate change and climate policy objectives. The methodology captures a set of impact channels through which climate change affects the economy by (1) connecting a set of biophysical models to the macroeconomic model and (2) exploring a set of development and climate scenarios. The paper summarizes the results for five countries, highlighting the sources and magnitudes of their vulnerability --- with estimated gross domestic product losses in 2050 exceeding 10 percent of gross domestic product in some countries and scenarios, although only a small set of impact channels is included. The paper also presents estimates of the macroeconomic gains from sector-level adaptation interventions, considering their upfront costs and avoided climate impacts and finding significant net gross domestic product gains from adaptation opportunities identified in the Country Climate and Development Reports. Finally, the paper discusses the limits of current modeling approaches, and their complementarity with empirical approaches based on historical data series. The integrated modeling approach proposed in this paper can inform policymakers as they make proactive decisions on climate change adaptation and resilience.
  • Publication
    Gender Gaps in the Performance of Small Firms: Evidence from Urban Peru
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-09-23) Celiku, Bledi; Ubfal, Diego; Valdivia, Martin
    This paper estimates the gender gap in the performance of firms in Peru using representative data on both formal and informal firms. On average, informal female-led firms have lower sales, labor productivity, and profits compared to their male-led counterparts, with differences more pronounced when controlling for observable determinants of firm performance. However, gender gaps are only significant at the bottom of the performance distribution of informal firms, and these gaps disappear at the top of the distribution of informal firms and for formal firms. Possible explanations for the performance gaps at the bottom of the distribution include the higher likelihood of small, female-led firms being home-based, which is linked to lower profits, and their concentration in less profitable sectors. The paper provides suggestive evidence that household responsibilities play a key role in explaining the gender gap in firm performance among informal firms. Therefore, policies that promote access to care services or foster a more equal distribution of household activities may reduce gender productivity gaps and allow for a more efficient allocation of resources.
  • Publication
    The Exposure of Workers to Artificial Intelligence in Low- and Middle-Income Countries
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-02-05) Demombynes, Gabriel; Langbein, Jörg; Weber, Michael
    Research on the labor market implications of artificial intelligence has focused principally on high-income countries. This paper analyzes this issue using microdata from a large set of low- and middle-income countries, applying a measure of potential artificial intelligence occupational exposure to a harmonized set of labor force surveys for 25 countries, covering a population of 3.5 billion people. The approach advances work by using harmonized microdata at the level of individual workers, which allows for a multivariate analysis of factors associated with exposure. Additionally, unlike earlier papers, the paper uses highly detailed (4 digit) occupation codes, which provide a more reliable mapping of artificial intelligence exposure to occupation. Results within countries, show that artificial intelligence exposure is higher for women, urban workers, and those with higher education. Exposure decreases by country income level, with high exposure for just 12 percent of workers in low-income countries and 15 percent of workers in lower-middle-income countries. Furthermore, lack of access to electricity limits effective exposure in low-income countries. These results suggest that for developing countries, and in particular low-income countries, the labor market impacts of artificial intelligence will be more limited than in high-income countries. While greater exposure to artificial intelligence indicates larger potential for future changes in certain occupations, it does not equate to job loss, as it could result in augmentation of worker productivity, automation of some tasks, or both.
  • Publication
    Geopolitical Risks and Trade
    (Washington, DC: World Bank, 2025-09-23) Mulabdic, Alen; Yotov, Yoto V.
    This paper studies the impact of geopolitical risks on international trade, using the Geopolitical Risk (GPR) index of Caldara and Iacoviello (2022) and an empirical gravity model. The impact of spikes in geopolitical risk on trade is negative, strong, and heterogeneous across sectors. The findings show that increases in geopolitical risk reduce trade by about 30 to 40 percent. These effects are equivalent to an increase of global tariffs of up to 14 percent. Services trade is most vulnerable to geopolitical risks, followed by agriculture, and the impact on manufacturing trade is moderate. These negative effects are partially mitigated by cultural and geographic proximity, as well as by the presence of trade agreements.
Journal
Journal Volume
Journal Issue

Related items

Showing items related by metadata.

  • Publication
    China’s Export Growth and the China Safeguard : Threats to the World Trading System?
    (2010-05-01) Bown, Chad P.; Crowley, Meredith A.
    Is there evidence from China's pre-WTO accession period that newly imposed U.S. or EU import restrictions deflect Chinese exports to third markets? The authors examine this question by drawing on a newly constructed data set of U.S. and EU product-level import restrictions on Chinese trade imposed between 1992 and 2001 and estimate their impact on Chinese exports to 38 alternative markets. There is no systematic evidence that the import restrictions imposed during this period resulted in Chinese exports surging to such alternate destinations. To the contrary, there is weak evidence of a chilling effect on China's exports to third markets.
  • Publication
    Antidumping and Market Competition : Implications for Emerging Economies
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2012-09) McCulloch, Rachel; Bown, Chad P.
    While the original justification of the antidumping laws in the industrial economies was to protect domestic consumers against predation by foreign suppliers, by the early 1990s the laws and their use had evolved so much that the opposite concern arose. Rather than attacking anti-competitive behavior, dumping complaints by domestic firms were being used to facilitate collusion among suppliers and enforce cartel arrangements. This paper examines the predation and anti-competitiveness issues from the perspective of the "new users" of antidumping -- the major emerging economies for which antidumping is now a major tool in the trade policy arsenal. The paper examines these concerns in light of important ways in which the world economy and international trading system have been changing since the early 1990s, including more firms and more countries participating in international trade, but also more extensive links among suppliers and consumers through multinational firm activity and vertical specialization.
  • Publication
    Export Liberalization, Job Creation and the Skill Premium : Evidence from the U.S.-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-04) Fukase, Emiko
    This paper explores how the expansion of labor-intensive manufacturing exports resulting from the United States-Vietnam Bilateral Trade Agreement in 2001 translated into wages of skilled and unskilled workers and the skill premium in Vietnam through the channel of labor demand. In order to isolate the impacts of trade shock from the effects of other market-oriented reforms, a strategy of exploiting the regional variation in difference in exposure to trade is employed. Using the data on panel individuals from the Vietnam Household Living Standards Surveys of 2002 and 2004, and addressing the issue of endogeneity, the results confirm the existence of a Stolper-Samuelson type effect. That is, those provinces more exposed to the increase in exports experienced relatively larger wage growth for unskilled workers and a decline of (or a smaller increase in) the relative wages of skilled and unskilled workers. During the period 2000-2004, the skill premium increased for Vietnam's economy as a whole in the sample of panel individuals. Thus, the Stolper-Samuelson type effect appears to have mitigated but did not outweigh the impacts of other factors that contributed to the rise in the skill premium.
  • Publication
    Developing Countries, Dispute Settlement, and the Advisory Centre on WTO Law
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2010-01) McCulloch, Rachel; Bown, Chad P.
    Critical appraisals of the current and potential benefits from developing country engagement in the World Trade Organization (WTO) focus mainly on the Doha Round of negotiations. This paper examines developing country participation in the WTO dispute settlement system to enforce foreign market access rights already negotiated in earlier multilateral rounds. The dispute data from 1995 through 2008 reveal three notable trends: developing countries sustained rate of self-enforcement actions despite declining use of the Dispute Settlement Understanding (DSU) by developed countries, developing countries increased use of the DSU to self-enforce their access to the markets of developing as well as developed country markets, and the prevalence of disputes targeting highly observable causes of lost foreign market access, such as antidumping, countervailing duties, and safeguards. The paper also examines potential impacts of the Advisory Centre on WTO Law (ACWL) into the WTO system in 2001. A close look at the data reveals evidence on at least three channels through which the ACWL may be enhancing developing countries' ability to self-enforce foreign market access: increased initiation of sole-complainant cases, more extensive pursuit of the DSU legal process for any given case, and initiation of disputes over smaller values of lost trade.
  • Publication
    Trade Policy Flexibilities and Turkey : Tariffs, Antidumping, Safeguards, and WTO Dispute Settlement
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2013-01) Bown, Chad P.
    Trade policy commitments to lower import tariffs and to maintain tariffs at low levels entail short and long-run political-economic costs and benefits. Empirical work examining the relationship between such commitments and the exercise of trade policy flexibilities is still relatively nascent, especially for emerging economies. This paper provides a rich, empirically-based assessment of ways that Turkey exercised trade policy flexibilities during the global economic crisis of 2008-11. First, and despite multilateral and customs union commitments that might limit changes to applied tariffs, Turkey made changes to both its applied Most Favored Nation and preferential tariffs that cumulatively affect nearly 9 percent of manufacturing imports and 10 percent of import product lines. Second, Turkey's cumulative application of temporary trade barrier (TTB) policies -- antidumping, safeguards and countervailing duties -- are estimated to impact by 2011 an additional 4 percent of imports and 6 percent of product lines. Other surprising results on Turkey's use of flexibilities include: extending the duration of previously imposed antidumping and safeguards beyond expected removal dates, removing one TTB policy over a set of products and immediately reapplying a different TTB policy, covering lengthy upstream and downstream segments of important industries, and deepening discriminatory preference margins already inherent in existing preferential trade agreements.

Users also downloaded

Showing related downloaded files

  • Publication
    Design Thinking for Social Innovation
    (2010-07) Brown, Tim; Wyatt, Jocelyn
    Designers have traditionally focused on enchancing the look and functionality of products.
  • Publication
    Breaking the Conflict Trap : Civil War and Development Policy
    (Washington, DC: World Bank and Oxford University Press, 2003) Collier, Paul; Elliott, V. L.; Hegre, Håvard; Hoeffler, Anke; Reynal-Querol, Marta; Sambanis, Nicholas
    Most wars are now civil wars. Even though international wars attract enormous global attention, they have become infrequent and brief. Civil wars usually attract less attention, but they have become increasingly common and typically go on for years. This report argues that civil war is now an important issue for development. War retards development, but conversely, development retards war. This double causation gives rise to virtuous and vicious circles. Where development succeeds, countries become progressively safer from violent conflict, making subsequent development easier. Where development fails, countries are at high risk of becoming caught in a conflict trap in which war wrecks the economy and increases the risk of further war. The global incidence of civil war is high because the international community has done little to avert it. Inertia is rooted in two beliefs: that we can safely 'let them fight it out among themselves' and that 'nothing can be done' because civil war is driven by ancestral ethnic and religious hatreds. The purpose of this report is to challenge these beliefs.
  • Publication
    Governance Matters IV : Governance Indicators for 1996-2004
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2005-06) Kaufmann, Daniel; Kraay, Aart; Mastruzzi, Massimo
    The authors present the latest update of their aggregate governance indicators, together with new analysis of several issues related to the use of these measures. The governance indicators measure the following six dimensions of governance: (1) voice and accountability; (2) political instability and violence; (3) government effectiveness; (4) regulatory quality; (5) rule of law, and (6) control of corruption. They cover 209 countries and territories for 1996, 1998, 2000, 2002, and 2004. They are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 37 separate data sources constructed by 31 organizations. The authors present estimates of the six dimensions of governance for each period, as well as margins of error capturing the range of likely values for each country. These margins of error are not unique to perceptions-based measures of governance, but are an important feature of all efforts to measure governance, including objective indicators. In fact, the authors give examples of how individual objective measures provide an incomplete picture of even the quite particular dimensions of governance that they are intended to measure. The authors also analyze in detail changes over time in their estimates of governance; provide a framework for assessing the statistical significance of changes in governance; and suggest a simple rule of thumb for identifying statistically significant changes in country governance over time. The ability to identify significant changes in governance over time is much higher for aggregate indicators than for any individual indicator. While the authors find that the quality of governance in a number of countries has changed significantly (in both directions), they also provide evidence suggesting that there are no trends, for better or worse, in global averages of governance. Finally, they interpret the strong observed correlation between income and governance, and argue against recent efforts to apply a discount to governance performance in low-income countries.
  • Publication
    Governance Matters VIII : Aggregate and Individual Governance Indicators 1996–2008
    (2009-06-01) Kaufmann, Daniel; Kraay, Aart; Mastruzzi, Massimo
    This paper reports on the 2009 update of the Worldwide Governance Indicators (WGI) research project, covering 212 countries and territories and measuring six dimensions of governance between 1996 and 2008: Voice and Accountability, Political Stability and Absence of Violence/Terrorism, Government Effectiveness, Regulatory Quality, Rule of Law, and Control of Corruption. These aggregate indicators are based on hundreds of specific and disaggregated individual variables measuring various dimensions of governance, taken from 35 data sources provided by 33 different organizations. The data reflect the views on governance of public sector, private sector and NGO experts, as well as thousands of citizen and firm survey respondents worldwide. The authors also explicitly report the margins of error accompanying each country estimate. These reflect the inherent difficulties in measuring governance using any kind of data. They find that even after taking margins of error into account, the WGI permit meaningful cross-country comparisons as well as monitoring progress over time. The aggregate indicators, together with the disaggregated underlying indicators, are available at www.govindicators.org.
  • Publication
    Government Matters III : Governance Indicators for 1996-2002
    (World Bank, Washington, DC, 2003-08) Kaufmann, Daniel; Kraay, Aart; Mastruzzi, Massimo
    The authors present estimates of six dimensions of governance covering 199 countries and territories for four time periods: 1996, 1998, 2000, and 2002. These indicators are based on several hundred individual variables measuring perceptions of governance, drawn from 25 separate data sources constructed by 18 different organizations. The authors assign these individual measures of governance to categories capturing key dimensions of governance and use an unobserved components model to construct six aggregate governance indicators in each of the four periods. They present the point estimates of the dimensions of governance as well as the margins of errors for each country for the four periods. The governance indicators reported here are an update and expansion of previous research work on indicators initiated in 1998 (Kaufmann, Kraay, and Zoido-Lobat 1999a,b and 2002). The authors also address various methodological issues, including the interpretation and use of the data given the estimated margins of errors.