The next session of the will take place on Wednesday, March 18th, from 3:30-4:30pm (CET).Â
Junyan Chen (Beijing Normal University) will present:
Pro-poor Bias of Trade? Revisiting the Unequal Consumer Gains from WTO Accession in China
with Mi Dai (Beijing Normal University)
The literature on trade and cost-of-living inequality generally finds that trade has a pro-poor bias in developing countries. We argue that this conclusion arises from the failure of previous studies to account for heterogeneity across income groups in their expenditure shares of imported goods. We illustrate this point by re-examining the impact of tariff reductions following China's accession to the WTO on cost-of-living inequality among urban households. We develop a methodology to impute household-level import shares by combining product-level expenditure data from household surveys with multi-region input-output tables. Accounting for household heterogeneity in import shares reverses the distributional effects of tariff reductions, shifting them from pro-poor to pro-rich. Our findings have broader implications for understanding the distributional effects of trade in developing countries.
You can join the next session using the following link:
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Microsoft Teams meeting
Join: https://teams.microsoft.com/meet/34802991188089?p=IWXaCvn3lZVerCk2RZ
Meeting ID: 348 029 911 880 89
Passcode: hA9TZ72b
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