Title：Exporting out of Agriculture: The Impact of WTO Accession on Structural Transformation in China

Speaker：Jessica Leight, Research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI)

Time：21:00 – 22:30 (Beijing Time, GMT+8), 9 April, 2021.  

Mode：Online   

Zoom ID: 931 678 9264 

Password：790971

About the speaker：

Jessica Leight is a Research Fellow in the Poverty, Health and Nutrition division at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI). She received her PhD in Economics from MIT in 2013.

Her research focuses on questions of human capital accumulation for women and girls as well as agricultural institutions and structural transformation in China and other developing countries including Nigeria, Ethiopia, Bangladesh, India, Kenya, Burkina Faso, and Mozambique. 

Her research has been published on prestigious journals such as Review of Economics and Statistics, Journal of Public Economics, Journal of Development Economics, and Journal of International Economics. 

Abstract:

This paper analyzes the effect of China's accession to the World Trade Organization in 2001 on structural transformation at the local level, exploiting cross-sectional variation in tariff uncertainty faced by county economies pre-2001. Using a new panel of 1,800 Chinese counties from 1996 to 2013, we find that counties more exposed to the reduction in tariff uncertainty post-accession are characterized by increased exports and foreign direct investment, shrinking agricultural sectors, expanding secondary sectors, and higher total and per capita GDP.  In addition, when labor substitutes from non-agricultural to agricultural production in counties exposed to positive trade shocks, agricultural output declines.