Research Seminar: Is Trade Decoupling from China after the US-China Trade War and COVID-19?

The trade tension between the U.S. and China since 2018 has caused a steady decoupling of the world's two largest economies. The pandemic outbreak in 2020 complicated this process and had numerous unanticipated repercussions. Is trade decoupling from China rhetoric or reality? This talk introduces two research projects to explore this question. The first research evaluated the spatio-temporal heterogeneity of international trade network vulnerabilities during the COVID-19. We found that China led the Asia-Pacific areas to ensure the world supply chain with the strongest resilience due to an effective COVID-19 containment, followed by high-income countries with fast vaccine roll-out (e.g., U.S.), whereas lowincome countries (e.g., Africa) show high vulnerability. The second research examined the effects of the US-China trade war and COVID-19 on U.S. imports separately and collectively, with various economic scopes. Our findings uncover intricate trading dynamics among the U.S., China, and Southeast Asia, through which Southeast Asian exporters have integrated more into value chains centered on Chinese suppliers and the U.S. effectively imported more goods indirectly through Southeast Asian exporters that imported from China.

Poster