International Migration and Export Flows: Evidence from the People’s Republic of China

Since China’s opening to international trade, the rapid growth of the country’s export sector has been coupled by an intensification of migratory outflows of ethnic Chinese. The literature has already stressed the beneficial role of migration in enhancing bilateral trade. The present paper applies a gravity model in order to capture the impact of migration on Chinese exports for a relatively long period of time (1995-2017) where significant developments take place. We estimated four regressions, each of them confirming the positive network effects of migration for boosting export growth. Apart from the main finding, it appears that the role of institutional and geographical proximity can prove to be complementary for trade enhancement. The results finally suggest mixed effects due to the countries’ import openness, indicating that China’s free trade agreements acts as a substitute for smoothing trade competition from third countries.