Is innovation-based competitiveness in trade crisisresistant? The case of China
Is innovation-based competitiveness in trade crisisresistant? The case of China

Summary/Abstract: At the time of world output growth, emerging and developing economies’ trade performs better than advanced economies’ trade, at least since the beginning century. The intuition that during a global recession the diversified trade of the latter is more resistant to a downturn than of the former does not seem to hold, at least for the 2008/2009 crisis. An investigation on China’s trade shows a disproportionate high performance in growth periods and a disproportionate high resistance in crisis periods. There is evidence that China’s changing trade structure from comparative advantage-based low-tech, labour-intensive exports to innovation-based high-tech exports occurred “just in time” with the crisis. The driving forces behind this timely change have to be explored in a future in-depth analysis.

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