Quality Infrastructure and Sustainable Bilateral China–Africa Trade: Evidence from National Standards

Can national standards, as a core component of national quality infrastructure (NQI), facilitate the sustainable development of South–South trade, or do they instead create barriers to market access? We examine this question by combining China’s industry-level national standards with highly disaggregated bilateral trade data for 52 African countries over 2002–2019. Using PPML models with country-product and country-year fixed effects, we find that Chinese national standards are associated with significantly higher imports from African countries, while no significant effect is found for China’s exports to Africa. Mechanism analysis shows that standards are associated with greater firm participation in African sourcing and higher imported-product quality. National standards are significantly positively correlated with the expansion of imported product varieties. Significant positive associations are found for resource-manufactured products and technology-manufactured products. It is also more pronounced for African countries with greater quality infrastructure capacity and for recommended, technical, and internationally aligned national standards. Aid for trade further strengthens the trade effects of standardization. These findings show that national standards can support the economic and structural sustainability of China–Africa trade by broadening market participation, improving product quality, and promoting trade diversification and structural upgrading, with these effects depending on partner-country quality infrastructure capacity and complementary trade-supporting institutions.