The impact of regional trade agreements on the quality of export products in China’s manufacturing industry

In recent years, under the risks of anti-globalization trend and uncertainty of trade war, countries have been entering into bilateral and multilateral regional trade agreements (RTAs). This study constructs both theoretical and empirical models to examine whether these RTAs can improve the quality of exported products among Chinese manufacturing enterprises, thereby expanding on a new policy research area that focuses on improving Chinese export quality or import quality of RTAs trade partners from China. The study finds that RTAs’ clause quantity (measured by clause coverage rate) and clause quality (measured by law commitment rate) play different roles. The former can generate “spaghetti bowl” effect but the latter can significantly promote export quality for Chinese manufacturers. The study also finds that RTAs can promote balanced development among the various regions in China and that a new generation of binding clauses in the “WTO-X field” with more new clauses strongly affects efforts to improve the quality of products exported to high and upper-middle income markets. We also find that for most industries, signing high-quality RTAs helps to improve export product quality, but there are no effect for some industries with laggard or special advanced technology.