A Global View of Productivity Growth in China

How does a country's productivity growth a¤ect worldwide real incomes through international trade? In this paper, we take this classic question to the data by measuring the spillover e¤ects of China's productivity growth. Our framework features traditional terms-of-trade e¤ects and new trade home market e¤ects as suggested by the theoretical literature and works from a reference point which perfectly matches industry-level trade. Focusing on the years 1995 to 2007, we find that the spillover e¤ects of China's productivity growth are small causing the real incomes of China's trading partners to increase by only 0.1 percent on average.