China
How does China’s trade profile look? Level of exports and imports over thirty years, structural composition, partner concentration, and the position on the economic-complexity frontier.
- Iron ores and concentrates: non-agglomerated (260111): imports 70% from Australia.
Ranked by import dependency (GeoDep 2022). Single-supplier concentration is the exposure.
Model a supply shock → - Lignite: whether or not pulverised, but not agglomerated, excluding jet (270210): imports 91% from Indonesia.
Ranked by import dependency (GeoDep 2022). Single-supplier concentration is the exposure.
Model a supply shock → - Carbonates: lithium carbonate (283691): imports 90% from Chile.
Ranked by import dependency (GeoDep 2022). Single-supplier concentration is the exposure.
Model a supply shock → - Cobalt: mattes and other intermediate products of cobalt metallurgy, unwrought cobalt, powders (810520): imports 96% from Dem. Rep. of the Congo.
Ranked by import dependency (GeoDep 2022). Single-supplier concentration is the exposure.
Model a supply shock → - Vegetable oils: palm oil and its fractions, other than crude, whether or not refined, but not chemically modified (151190): imports 72% from Indonesia.
Ranked by import dependency (GeoDep 2022). Single-supplier concentration is the exposure.
Model a supply shock →
- Alkaloids, vegetable: of rye ergot and their derivatives, lysergic acid and its salts (293963): proximity 1.00 to current capabilities, complexity PCI +1.53, world market $5.1m.
Ranked by density × complexity (product space 2024).
See product → - Optical elements: polarising material, sheets and plates thereof (900120): proximity 0.43 to current capabilities, complexity PCI +3.07, world market $4.5bn.
Ranked by density × complexity (product space 2024).
See product → - Cyanides and cyanide oxides: other than of sodium (283719): proximity 0.55 to current capabilities, complexity PCI +2.24, world market $74.8m.
Ranked by density × complexity (product space 2024).
See product → - Machine-tools: for boring-milling by removing metal, numerically controlled (845931): proximity 0.55 to current capabilities, complexity PCI +2.12, world market $616.8m.
Ranked by density × complexity (product space 2024).
See product → - Plastics: plates, sheets, film, foil and strip, of cellulose acetate, non-cellular and not reinforced, laminated, supported or similarly combined with other materials (392073): proximity 0.50 to current capabilities, complexity PCI +2.30, world market $1.3bn.
Ranked by density × complexity (product space 2024).
See product →
China: merchandise exports and imports, 1996-2024
/macro/CHN page.Query
SELECT year, total_exports*1000 AS exports_usd, total_imports*1000 AS imports_usd, trade_balance*1000 AS balance_usd FROM 'data/parquet/country_year_totals.parquet' WHERE country_code = 156 ORDER BY year;
Trade balance, 1996-2024
Export composition
The structural change in what a country exports, from agriculture to manufactures to services, or between HS sections, is one of the most studied transitions in development economics (Imbs & Wacziarg 2003; Hausmann, Hwang & Rodrik 2007). The chart below shows the five largest HS sections of China’s exports in 2024, plotted back thirty years.
Top-5 HS sections of exports, 1996-2024
Export basket by HS chapter, 2024 · top-30 $3.29T of $3.60T total
Query
SELECT SUBSTRING(product_code, 1, 2) AS chapter_code,
ANY_VALUE(p.chapter) AS chapter_name,
p.section,
SUM(cyp.export_value) * 1000 AS value_usd
FROM 'data/parquet/country_year_product/year=2024/*.parquet' cyp
JOIN 'data/parquet/products.parquet' p ON p.code = cyp.product_code
WHERE cyp.country_code = 156 AND cyp.export_value > 0 AND p.section IS NOT NULL
GROUP BY chapter_code, p.section
ORDER BY value_usd DESC LIMIT 30;Import basket by HS chapter, 2024 · top-30 $2.01T of $2.16T total
Query
SELECT SUBSTRING(product_code, 1, 2) AS chapter_code,
ANY_VALUE(p.chapter) AS chapter_name,
p.section,
SUM(cyp.import_value) * 1000 AS value_usd
FROM 'data/parquet/country_year_product/year=2024/*.parquet' cyp
JOIN 'data/parquet/products.parquet' p ON p.code = cyp.product_code
WHERE cyp.country_code = 156 AND cyp.import_value > 0 AND p.section IS NOT NULL
GROUP BY chapter_code, p.section
ORDER BY value_usd DESC LIMIT 30;Who it sells to
World map of export destinations, 2024
Top 12 export destinations, 2024
What moved exports between years
The line charts above show levels over time; they do not answer the analyst’s next question: when exports changed between 2023 and 2024, which partners and which products accounted for how much of it? The two bridge charts below answer that directly. Contributors are ordered by absolute dollar change, largest first, and every line outside the top 8 is collapsed into one residual bar so the columns still sum exactly to the total move.
Figure 3c. Export change by partner, 2023-2024
Exports moved from $3.42T to $3.60T (+$177.1B).
Figure 3d. Export change by product, 2023-2024
Exports moved from $3.42T to $3.60T (+$177.1B).
Economic complexity
The Economic Complexity Index (ECI), building on Hidalgo & Hausmann (2009, PNAS) and formalized as the eigenvalue (second-eigenvector) index in the Atlas of Economic Complexity, ranks countries by the productive knowledge embedded in their export basket. Countries that export many products, and whose products are also exported by few others, score high. ECI is predictive of subsequent income growth and structural transformation; see Hausmann et al. (2014, The Atlas of Economic Complexity, MIT Press) for the full methodology and the comparative country atlas. For a non-linear alternative that ranks fast-diversifying economies differently (China, for instance, sits far higher on fitness than on ECI), compare the Economic Fitness metric of Tacchella et al. (2012).
China: ECI trajectory, 1996-2024
Export concentration (HHI) and product count, 1996-2024
Effective number of exported products (1/HHI)
Niche leadership
Revealed comparative advantage (Balassa 1965) says a country is specialised in a product when its share of that product’s world exports exceeds the country’s share of all world exports. A stronger version asks: which HS6 lines does the country lead the world in? The table below lists the ten largest export lines (by value) where China ranks in the world top-5 in 2024, restricted to products with at least US$10M of global trade so tiny niches don’t crowd out economically meaningful positions. This is the “niche leadership” view: products the country is not just diversified in, but competitive at the frontier.
China: top 10 HS6 lines with world top-5 rank, 2024
Query
WITH prod_year AS (
SELECT product_code, country_code, SUM(export_value) AS v
FROM 'data/parquet/country_year_product/year=2024/*.parquet'
WHERE export_value > 0 GROUP BY product_code, country_code
), ranked AS (
SELECT product_code, country_code, v,
RANK() OVER (PARTITION BY product_code ORDER BY v DESC) AS world_rank
FROM prod_year
WHERE product_code IN (SELECT product_code FROM prod_year GROUP BY product_code HAVING SUM(v)*1000 >= 1e7)
)
SELECT product_code, v*1000 AS value_usd, world_rank
FROM ranked WHERE country_code = 156 AND world_rank <= 5
ORDER BY v DESC LIMIT 10;Peer countries by structural profile
Which economies share the closest structural profile to China? Each country is placed in a three-dimensional space of economic complexity (ECI), log GDP per capita, and log total exports, each standardised to zero mean and unit variance in 2024. The five nearest neighbours by Euclidean distance in that space are China’s closest structural peers, similar on productive-capability, income level, and scale of external trade. This is a trade-specific adaptation of the synthetic-control “donor pool” logic (Abadie, Diamond & Hainmueller 2010).
China: five closest structural peers, 2024
Margins of export growth
Hummels & Klenow (2005, “The variety and quality of a nation’s exports,” American Economic Review95(3): 704-723) introduced the split of a country’s exports into an extensive margin (the set of goods it ships) and an intensive margin (how much of each). In their own measure the extensive margin is nota raw line count: following Feenstra (1994), each category is weighted by its importance in world trade. The figure below applies a simplified, count-based version of that distinction to one country’s export growth over time, so the levels are a proxy, not the Feenstra-weighted index. The two margins still respond to different levers: trade-cost reductions and discovery push the extensive margin (Melitz 2003), while productivity and demand push the intensive.
Margins of export growth, 2014-2024
Query
SELECT h.year, h.num_products, t.total_exports*1000 AS exports_usd FROM 'data/parquet/country_hhi.parquet' h JOIN 'data/parquet/country_year_totals.parquet' t USING(country_code, year) WHERE h.country_code = 156 AND h.year IN (2014, 2024);
Export basket on the complexity frontier
China: export value vs. product complexity (PCI), 2024
Related
- Value-chain position, domestic vs foreign value added in China’s exports, VAX ratio, and upstream/downstream index (OECD TiVA)
- Economic Fitness, the non-linear Tacchella-Pietronero complexity ranking, and how it diverges from ECI
- Research index, analytical pieces grounded in BACI flows and gravity covariates
- Sector monitor, quarterly deep dives on 12 HS-defined sectors
- Compare China against peer economies
- Exporter profile, basket composition, RCA, and partners