Browsing by Author "QIU, XINGYUAN"

This paper investigates the economic implications of the 2018 US-China trade war on the EU, and measures the trade restrictiveness of non-tariff barriers by applying the Trade Restrictiveness Index methodology under the framework of Kee et al. (2009). A cross-sectional OLS regression was applied to estimate the ad-valorem equivalent of NTBs in 2017 and 2018, which were then used to construct the TRIs and deadweight loss. The paper depicts empirical evidences that NTBs tend to play a more crucial role than tariffs in the EU countries, as their NTBs make, on average, an additional contribution of more than 83% to the overall protection level measured solely by tariffs. Besides, the results suggest that both the restrictive level of NTBs and the overall protection level imposed by the EU fell from 2017 to 2018. In addition, a more-developed EU country tends to impose a lower restrictive level of NTBs than a relatively less-developed EU country during the US-China trade war. Moreover, the decreasing TRI, OTRI, MA-OTRI and DWL during this period reveals that the US and China have both held out the olive branches to the EU, while the EU also seized the opportunity to strengthen bilateral trade and cooperation with them. Especially, the reason for the decreasing DWL can be resulted from the backspin that the positive benefits brought by strengthening relationships and seeking deeper cooperation with alternative trading partners in 2018 outweigh the negative impacts caused by the US-China trade war and broken-down confidence of global investors in 2017. From a sectional level, there is evidence supporting the advice that the EU should try to avoid export products that with the highest AVEs imposed by the US and China to these two countries respectively, such as miscellaneous manufactured articles, rubber and plastics in my case.