Trade Policy Uncertainty, Innovation and Total Factor Productivity

This paper explores the impact of trade policy uncertainty (TPU) shock on China’s total factor productivity. Using economic panel data for China, OECD countries, Hong Kong SAR, Macao SAR, and Singapore from the period 2003–2019, in this paper, we treat U.S.–China trade frictional events in 2016 and 2017 as a quasi-experiment to study the impact of TPU surge on China’s TFP under the synthetic control method (SCM) and generalized synthetic control method (GSCM), treating the OECD countries, Hong Kong SAR, Macao SAR, and Singapore as a control group. We found that TPU surge has a significantly negative causal effect on China’s TFP. SCM analysis, taking 2016 (2017) as the policy implementation time, showed that the average TFP loss borne by China due to trade policy uncertainty in 2017 and 2018 was 2.7% (3.5%). The VAR model showed that China’s trade policy uncertainty reduces China’s TFP through two channels: the shrinking channel of domestic R&D innovation, and the shrinking channel of the domestic sector’s use of foreign patents. This conclusion is robust according to the GSCM. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this paper is the first attempt to examine the long-term technological impact of TPU surge during U.S.–China trade frictional events. Our findings suggest that trade friction harms technological progress, and reducing TPU can significantly enhance innovation and TFP.