December 7th,The "2024 International Trade Disputes and Globalization Restructuring Academic Symposium"Successfully held at Lingnan University in Hong Kong."
Luo Jinfeng, Assistant Professor at Lingnan University, attended the eighth sub-forum, "Response to Trade Policy Shocks," chaired by Shi Wei, Professor at the Institute of Economics and Social Research, Jinan University, and shared his article entitled "Clustering as a Shield: Trade War and Economic Resilience."
Luo Jinfeng is an assistant professor at Lingnan University. His research focuses on macroeconomics, particularly macroeconomic labor, macroeconomic development, and spatial economics. His research findings have been published in [Journal Name - not specified].Journal of Monetary Economics，Emerging Markets Finance and TradeHis publications include domestic and international journals such as *Financial Research* and *Chinese Economic Issues*. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from the University of Pennsylvania.
In his presentation, Luo Jinfeng pointed out that this paper explores the heterogeneous response of regional economic activities to negative trade shocks in the context of the Sino-US trade war, particularly the role of industrial agglomeration.Industrial clusters are used to describe the geographically concentrated distribution of companies within similar industries.This article constructs an index to measure the degree of industrial agglomeration at the prefecture-level city level in China and explores the differences in economic resilience among regions in the face of tariff shocks. Regression analysis shows that during the trade war, for every percentage point increase in export tariffs, the prefecture-level city at the 75th percentile of the agglomeration index distribution experienced a 0.19% smaller decrease in nighttime light intensity compared to the prefecture-level city at the 25th percentile. The article proposes that an important channel for industrial clusters to gain economic resilience is that, due to the homogeneity of factor markets, production factors among enterprises within the cluster can be reallocated at low cost. Further analysis shows that theoretical predictions based on this hypothesis are consistent with the following data characteristics: (1) some basic characteristics of cluster production, (2) a high degree of factor homogeneity in cluster regions, and (3) broader trade diversion in cluster regions. The results of this study highlight the important role of industrial clusters in mitigating the negative impacts of trade shocks and enhancing regional economic stability.
Shi Wei, Professor of the Institute of Economics and Social Research, Jinan UniversityComment on the article.He pointed out that the magnitude of the effect varies significantly and non-linearly with different degrees of geographical agglomeration, resulting in different regression results when using data from different levels. He believes this may be due to spatial spillover effects, and the specific mechanisms behind this deserve further investigation. Higher levels of industrial agglomeration are more closely associated with similar labor structures and closer input-output linkages between industries. The roles of these linkages and other common environmental factors (such as logistics infrastructure and the educational level of the workforce) also need to be discussed. Furthermore, the measurement of agglomeration is based on the geographical proximity of industries with similar comparative advantages. How this relates to differences in the degree of impact on export markets and the agglomeration phenomenon within industries is also a topic worthy of further analysis.
