The Impacts of the US‐China Trade War on ASEAN Export Performance to the US: An Event‐Study Analysis

ABSTRACT The high industrial inputs reliance on China while having the US as its indispensable export market and key investor as well as source of technology transfers puts Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN) in an increasingly precarious situation as the US‐China trade war intensifies. This paper studies the extent to which various US tariff hikes on Chinese goods imposed under Section 301 of the US Trade Acts of 1974 introduced in 2018, ranging from semiconductor to green technology, have impacted good exports from Southeast Asia to the US. Using an event‐study method, we show that the enactment of the Section 301 tariffs has increased exports of tariff‐related products relative to exports of non‐tariff‐related products from ASEAN‐7 countries (ASEAN minus Lao PDR, Myanmar and Brunei Darussalam) to the US. Country level analyses show that this increase is significant for Cambodia and Thailand but not for other ASEAN‐7 countries analysed.