The escalation of the trade war between the US and China in the past 18 months has cast a pall over business sentiment and growth in the advanced economies.
By contrast, activity growth in China has remained fairly robust at around 7 per cent, and inflation is close to the People’s Bank of China’s 3 per cent target ceiling. This buoyancy is surprising, since China was expected by many analysts (and probably by Donald Trump’s administration) to be the main casualty from the trade wars.
How has China managed to survive the trade shock so far? The first issue is to quantify the size of the exogenous shock to the Chinese economy from the trade wars. [1]