Will China continue to dominate global trade in 2023?
This year will be better than last for China’s economy but that doesn’t mean exports will sustain their pandemic-era momentum
By
ALICIA GARCIA HERREROJANUARY 21, 2023
Containers stacked high at a port in Qingdao in China's eastern Shandong province. Photo: AFP
China’s export performance is clearly important for the world, and certainly Europe. To start, global inflation not only depends on commodity prices but also on China’s export prices and its own cost dynamics.
Second, the European Union is the other major export machine, together with China, so developments in China’s export capacity and competitiveness are bound to affect the European economy.
China’s global export share had been on the rise for years until it first plateaued in 2015 and even came down with the US-led trade war against China. However, the trend changed radically after the first months of the Covid pandemic, as China suffered lockdowns in the first quarter of 2020 but reopened much faster than the rest of the world.
During 2020-21, until Omicron came to haunt China with renewed lockdowns, Chinese exports experienced annualized growth of 7%, and its export share in the world increased further to an astounding 15%.
At the same time, China’s increasingly central role in the global supply chain is another important point to take into account to understand China’s stellar export performance since the pandemic started. In fact, China’s even larger export share for intermediate goods points to the rising dependence of other countries’ supply chains on Chinese imports.
This is clearly also the case in the European Union. A very clear example is solar panels, where China already has more than 80% of the global export share, but also batteries for electric vehicles and even more so for their components and critical materials.
China’s export performance is clearly important for the world, and certainly Europe. To start, global inflation not only depends on commodity prices but also on China’s export prices and its own co…
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