The China Syndrome Revisited: A Meta-analysis of the Literature on How China’s Trade Impacts Other Countries’ Employment

In all negotiations and debates about trade openness, employment is a key issue. With the expansion of China's exports, many papers investigating the impacts of China's trade shock on employment have grown up. In this line of literature, ‘The China Syndrome’ documented by Autor et al. (2013 AER) is the representative, which states that China's export shock significantly reduces US employment in manufacture sector. In our paper, we collect related literature and find that whether China's trade shock decrease the employment in other countries or not is still uncertain. Different countries, sectors, time of the study and authors' academic nationality will all affect the difference of the conclusion. Using Meta-analysis of these literature, we basically find that (1) while the employment effects are positive for Asian countries, the impact on US and European countries does not necessarily show statistical negative coefficients; (2) the negative effect will be larger for cases where all the authors are American; (3) in nonmanufacturing sector, the effect will be positive; (4) intermediate exports can increase employment for other countries. Finally, after considering publication bias, the results are still robust.