The heterogeneous effects of Chinas accession to the world trade organization

Abstract

Chinas accession to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001 was a massive boostfor the multilateral trading system. We present descriptive evidence on the trade effects of Chinas WTO accession. Moreover, we combine the most recent approaches from the gravity literature of international trade to provide a causal analysis of the effects of Chinas WTO accession on bilateral trade with other WTO members. We find that the trade effectis positive on average. Moreover, we document substantial heterogeneity in the trade ef-fects across Chinas trading partners. These findings seem to be consistent with Chinasposition in global value chains