Effects of the People’s Republic of China’s Structural Change on the Exports of East and Southeast Asian Economies

Abstract

The Chinese economy is slowing down and, at the same time, it is in the midst of a structural transformation from an export- and investment-led economy to a domestic demand- and consumption-led growth paradigm. While there are widespread concerns in the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) trading partners about the effect of the PRC’s growth slowdown on their exports, the PRC’s structural change is also likely to have a significant impact—e.g. the PRC will import fewer machines and more cosmetics. The central objective of our paper is to empirically examine the effect of the PRC’s structural transformation on the exports of East and Southeast Asian economies, which have close trade linkages with the PRC. We find that economies which failed to increase the share of consumption goods in their exports to the PRC suffered larger declines in their exports to the PRC. In addition, economies that suffered losses in their shares of the PRC’s parts and components imports suffered losses in their shares of the PRC’s total imports.