The Other China Syndrome : Labor Market Effects of Export-Led Growth on Educational Attainment

This paper attemps to explore the interplay between trade and secondary educational attainment by exploiting Chinese data of from 31 provinces from 1998 to 2015. The findings of this paper suggest that export expansion has significantly negative consequences for the high school enrollment rate, especially in unequal provinces, after China’s accession to the WTO and during the global financial crisis. The adverse effect is robust, and the seemingly small effect can be enlarged given the population size: a 10% increase in exports value lowers high school enrollment by 15%~20%. The results imply that policymakers need to take the potential effects of trade on education into consideration when designing trade policies. In addition, in connection with the literature on Chinese import competition in the U.S. labor market (China Syndrome), this paper provides the other side of the picture by presenting how the Chinese export boom affects its own domestic labor market