LSE Eden Centre for Education Enhancement

Who is more exposed to a semiconductor supply shock, China or the US? We split out semiconductors in the ICIO tables economists use to trace supply chains and found that China's exposure is about 2.7× that of the US. Our updated tables, which extend work by the OECD, let us model the impact of a major supply-chain shock. We simulate the global economy 2–3 years after a large fall in Taiwanese productivity plus a full China–West trade decoupling. Our simulation shows China's real GNE falling by ~3% vs ~0.6% for the US. The Chinese electronics industry would pay 81% more for chips overall, and 17× for domestic advanced processors. This work has limitations. ICIO tables run to 2022 and involve heavy imputation and balancing, and our estimates are built on those estimates. Our simulations also rest on some strong assumptions. However, across robustness checks, China's 2022 exposure stays over 2.3× that of the US, and an exploratory extrapolation to 2024 only cuts the gap to 2.2×. The loss to China’s real GNE remains at least 3.7× the US loss, and China-made processors always rise in price more than US-made ones. Read @DanCareyEcon’s write-up and download the full research paper: epoch.ai/publications/china-…