"Trade policy and industrial policy in China: What motivates public authorities to apply restrictions on exports?,"
CEPII Working Paper 2015- 05 , April 2015 , CEPII.
This work investigates the motivations behind the Chinese fiscal policy on exports. It relies on very detailed product level (HS 6 digit) data over the period 2002-12 covering both export tax and export VAT rebate. It aims to uncover the respective importance of the various policy motivations and how they evolved over time. Our empirical analysis relates the tax rates to proxies of official objectives pursued by the Chinese public authorities such as those related to the promotion of technology or protection of the environment but also other unstated motives pertaining to subsidization of downstream sectors and terms of trade. Our results suggest that the Chinese fiscal policy targeting exports follows a variety of objectives whose relative importance changed over the period 2002-2012.
Trade policy ; industrial policy ; China ; VAT system ; export tax