Aggregate effect of China's WTO accession

At the national level, we focus on evaluating the effect of China's WTO accession on macroeconomic indicators as well as on agricultural trade, including imports and exports. As expected and similar to many other studies, China's WTO accession, by reducing or eliminating import tariffs, would benefit the economy at the aggregate level. The gain comes from a more efficient allocation of current factor endowments, which allows GDP and the level of consumers' aggregate consumption to …

…affects poor people in these regions. The poverty ratio is already high in the less-developed regions. Moreover, in these regions the poverty ratio is strongly associated with the change in rural income (Fan et al. 2001b). Therefore, the careful design of government policies and the use of its limited resources to avoid the adverse effects of the WTO accession on less-developed areas deserve great attention both from China's policymakers, and researchers and international development agencies.