The 2020 Chinese export control law: a new compliance nightmare on the foreign trade law horizon?

On 1 December 2020, the Export Control Law of the People’s Republic of China entered into force. The PRC’s first comprehensive piece of legislation on export control had been passed by the Standing Committee of the National People’s Congress on 17 October 2020 after a three-year legislative process. Regarded as one of the PRC’s key responses in the engulfing China-United States trade dispute, the law has attracted wide public attention. It has been described as “a new flashpoint in EU-China relations” posing “substantial challenges for European companies”. The compliance costs of European companies who have a direct or indirect trade relationship with China will likely increase as a consequence of the ECL and so does the legal uncertainty involved in doing business in and with China. The essay will examine the ECL’s background (1) as well as its legislative approach and key provisions (2). It will then attempt to gauge the ECL’s immediate impacts and project its potential future developments (3).

Does Trade Related Sectoral Infrastructure Make Chinese Exports More Sophisticated and Diversified?

Whether better infrastructure influences Chinese export sophistication (ES) and diversification (ED) is an important question, which surprisingly remains unaddressed. The current study contributes to the ES and ED literature by capturing the symmetric and asymmetric effect of infrastructure on ES and ED. We employ a robust dynamically simulated autoregressive distributed lag (DYS-ARDL) dynamic method, which is an extended version of NARDL and ARDL. The major aim of this new DYS-ARDL dynamic approach was to abolish the issue in orthodox ARDL model approach while examining the long-run and short-run. The new dynamic DYS-ARDL model is accomplished in estimating, stimulating, and robotically plotting predictions of counterfactual alterations in one explanatory variable and its impact on the dependent variable while holding the remaining regressors constant. Furthermore, this new method of DYS-ARDL model can estimate, stimulate, and plot to forecast graphs of positive and negative variations in the variables robotically as well as their short and long-run associations. Interestingly, the results of this study witness the presence of long-run relationship between infrastructure and ES and ED in China. The present study shows that better infrastructure will be more beneficial for Chinese ED and ES.