Chinas Trade Patterns

This book provides the first comprehensive and quantitative assessment of the impact of reform policies on the Chinese domestic economy at the detailed sectoral level. Beginning with a survey of China's economic reform progress, the author quantitatively measures China's trade performance and the comparative advantage for tradable-good-producing industries over the reform period.

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Zhang (economics, U. of Melbourne) presents an empirical study of China's shifting trade patterns. He finds that the first two decades of reform (1978 to 1996) have shifted trade flows in the direction of national comparative advantage. He also argues that rapid growth has begun to erode comparative advantage in the labor-intensive manufactures that once powered China's export surge. Finally, future trends in the tradable goods producing sector are analyzed. Annotation c. Book News, Inc., Portland, OR (booknews.com)

Xiao-guang Zhang is Lecturer in Economics at the University of Melbourne, Australia.