The Belt and Road Initiative (BRI) is designed to intensify reciprocal trade preferentiality between China and the Belt-Road countries. However, there has been little research empirically examining the policy effects on the trade links between China and the involved countries. This paper attempts to evaluate the BRI effects quantitatively by constructing a new bilateral revealed trade preference index to measure the bilateral trade preferentiality between China and its 114 trading partners. Using a difference in differences model, we show that the trade of China with the Belt-Road countries has become more preferentially linked since the implementation of the BRI. In particular, the bilateral revealed trade preference index between China and the Belt-Road countries has grown approximately 8% faster than has that with the non-Belt-Road countries. We further show that the BRI effects are heterogeneous across different regions. The bilateral trade links have been more significantly intensified in the regions of the China–Indochina Peninsula Economic Corridor, the China–Pakistan Economic Corridor, the China–Central Asia–West Asia Economic Corridor and the Bangladesh–China–India–Myanmar Economic Corridor. The findings strongly indicate that BRI has been acting as a catalyst for intensifying bilateral trade preferentiality between China and the Belt-Road countries.

The technological structure of China's manufactured exports has significantly upgraded with the rapid export growth since the 1990s, which caused us to think whether the sophistication of China's manufactured export has caught up that of the developed countries. This paper calculates the VS-adjusted index of sophistication of China's manufactured exports by eliminating the “technological contribution” of imported intermediates resulted from vertical specialization, and then empirically tests the determinants of China's sophistication of manufactured exports. It is found that the genuine sophistication level of China's manufacturing exports measured by VS-adjusted domestic sophistication is lower than the usual measurement of total sophistication. What's more, both the levels of domestic sophistication and total sophistication of China's manufacturing exports are obviously lower than those of the main OECD countries. The embodied sophistication of imported intermediates is quite larger than total s...

This paper examines the impact of the Silk Road e-commerce initiative on the digital value-added trade (DVAT) between China and the BRI participating countries, by constructing a staggered DID model and the indicators of simple and complex DVAT based on the Eora MRIO database from 1990 to 2022. The findings indicate that signing e-commerce cooperation memorandum significantly promotes DVAT between China and BRI participating countries. The Silk Road e-commerce initiative more effectively promotes digital value-added flows from China to BRI participating countries in simple DVAT, and it only promotes digital value-added flows from BRI participating countries to China in complex DVAT. The positive effects are primarily achieved through three pathways: narrowing the digital technology gap and reinforcing the institutional arrangements between China and BRI participating countries, as well as enhancing the comparative advantages in digital industries among China and BRI participating countries. The heterogeneity analysis indicates that the Silk Road e-commerce cooperation initiative significantly promotes simple DVAT between China and the BRI participating countries that are positioned downstream in the digital global value chain (GVC), those with closer bilateral political relations, European countries, and high-income nations. Meanwhile, cooperation with Asian countries, and lower-income partners tends to increase complex DVAT, reflecting deeper industrial-chain integration.

On the basis of the unbalanced panel financial data of Chinese commercial banks from 2007–2021, this paper first conducts an identification test of the bank risk-taking channel for China’s monetary policy transmission. Then, it tests the impact of bank microcharacteristics and macroeconomic fluctuations on bank risk-taking in monetary policy transmission. The empirical results reveal the presence of the risk-taking channel for China’s monetary policy transmission. China’s bank risk-taking in monetary policy transmission is asymmetric because of the heterogeneity of bank microcharacteristics and macroeconomic fluctuations; i.e., the larger the asset size is, the greater the capital adequacy ratio is, the greater the return on net assets is, the greater the risk-taking level is, and the lower the risk-taking level of banks with poorer liquidity and higher branch coverage is. The impact of macroeconomic fluctuations is reflected in the fact that the higher the economic growth rate is, the greater the risk-taking level of banks. Therefore, it is necessary to enhance the transparency of monetary policy, strengthen the supervision of commercial banks, stabilize the macroeconomic environment, match the risk-taking level of banks with monetary credit and economic growth, and improve the effect of monetary policy transmission.