Chinese Trade Reforms, Market Access and Foreign Competition: the Patterns of French Exporters ∗

A unilateral trade reform has two opposite effects on firms ’ export patterns: (i) ex-pansion of export opportunities for foreign firms exporting to that destination and (ii) intensification of foreign competition in the liberalized market. The main contribution of this paper is to investigate the trade-off between market access growth and the strength-ening of competitive pressures. Using French firm-product-destination data, we explore how the margins of French exports react to an exogenous variation in Chinese import tariff cuts relative to tariff changes in other Asian destinations. Our findings suggest that over the period 1999-2005 the average 7 percentage points decline in Chinese tariffs results in an increase of French firms ’ exported products by almost 6 log points and an expansion of export sales by 14 log points more than with respect to the other Asian countries. These results are robust when accounting for foreign competition of third countries faced by French firms in the liberalized market