Who Loses from China’s Export Gains?

What would the world look like if China’s exports kept rising at the same rate they are today? This scenario is purely hypothetical, and its results should be treated with commensurate caution, but it illustrates the risk that continued Chinese export growth poses to Western economies trying to preserve their industrial bases.

At recent growth rates, China’s share of global exports on a volume basis could grow from 20% in 2025 to 28% in 2030, causing losses in the rest of the world’s market share. On top of that, China’s falling export prices mean that its export gains and other countries’ resulting losses would destroy more trading value than the rise in trade volumes would create. Large trading economies with export profiles similar to China like the United States, Germany, Indonesia, and France stand to lose the most. These trading losses would intensify disinvestment pressures in Western economies.

Projecting China’s export growth and its implications for global trade

China’s trade surplus has expanded significantly over the last five years, reaching $1.19 trillion in 2025. What might global trade look like if this export expansion continues unabated? Answers to this question urgently needed, as China’s export machine shows few indications of slowing down despite growing alarm across industrialized economies. Beijing views its persistent and large surplus as normal, with MOFCOM recently claiming in a position paper that “manufacturing powerhouses like the UK, US, Japan, and Germany all recorded trade surpluses for a long time. It is also quite common for Germany and Japan to have a current account surplus of over 6% of their GDP.” Continued domestic deflationary pressures and currency depreciation will only serve to reinforce these trends.

We project that if current trends continued, China’s absolute export volume would increase by roughly 50% from 2025 to 2030. Using the same projections for the rest of the world’s exports, we estimate that China’s global export share would expand from 20% to 28% from 2025 to 2030 (Figure 1).

An increase in China’s global export share implies a decline in the rest of the world’s share. Unsurprisingly, we find that the countries that bear the greatest costs are those that are large trading economies in general, and have export profiles most similar to China’s. By 2030, we estimate that the US will lose 1.2 percentage points (pp) of its share of global trade, Indonesia 0.8pp, Canada 0.5pp, Germany 0.4pp, and the Netherlands 0.4pp. The rest of the world combined is projected to lose 4.6pp. Combined, these figures account for China’s estimated ~8pp gain.

China’s export growth reduces the overall value of global trade

Export shares alone present an incomplete picture of the future of global trade. As part of our projections, we extrapolate recent trends to estimate export prices and ultimately values (as functions of volumes and prices) by sector and country.

Prices

China’s recent export expansion has coincided with significant declines in export prices. While they vary by industry, export prices from China have declined substantially across most industrial categories. Consider, for example, machinery (HS 84), vehicles (HS 87), and electrical equipment (HS 85). Between 2022 and 2024, China’s export prices declined by 5%, 8%, and 10%, respectively (Figure 3). This is in stark contrast to the export prices of other major exporters of these categories: Except for a marginal 0.6% decline in German vehicle export prices, every export category saw price increases. In some categories, the increases were substantial: US and Italian machinery prices increased by 16-17%, while US electrical equipment export prices rose 26.6%.

Some of the divergence between China and the rest of the world’s (ROW) exports may be due to export basket effects. In other words, China may be exporting simpler, less expensive products than other countries. But this seems unlikely: China is competing in increasingly sophisticated products, and price declines are seen across a range of HS codes. Because of declining export prices from China (projected at -5% per year through 2030), China will likely make more gains in export volumes than it will in export values. In our projections, China’s export values grow by only 3.5% per year from 2025 to 2030. This is slower than the 4.2% average for the rest of the world. Meanwhile, China’s export volumes are projected to expand by more than 9% per year, while ex-China volume growth is estimated at -0.3% annually.

Export values

Our primary goal is to estimate the extent of potential losses in country export values arising from China’s global market share gains. To do so, we use projections of volume and price growth to estimate export values at the country-industry level. Estimating potential export value losses, however, requires comparing these projections against a counterfactual baseline of global trade in 2030, which requires certain assumptions. We construct this baseline scenario by assuming that world export volumes and country export prices will trend along their recent growth rates, but country export shares across industries remain fixed at the 2025 levels. This is the counterfactual to our test case scenario, where export volumes and prices also grow at recent rates, but we project China’s share gains and losses across industries assuming that recent trends continue. Gains in China’s export share cause declines in other countries’ export shares commensurate with their share of ex-China trade in 2025.

We estimate export losses by calculating the difference between the export values in these two scenarios resulting from China’s share gains. As a robustness check, we also swap our baseline with a more conservative, static scenario, where only world export volumes grow and country prices/export shares remain fixed at their current levels (for a full description of the methodology, see the Methodological Appendix).

This is, of course, a highly imperfect exercise and our projections yield a simplified picture of the future. The global economy is complex, industries are rapidly evolving, and political resistance to China’s exports is already emerging. But as domestic demand remains weak and no alternative growth engines have emerged to replace property and infrastructure, China will continue to rely on export growth. Our approach is undoubtedly constrained, but we nonetheless believe it to be a useful indicative estimate of the impacts of continued growth in China’s exports on global trade.

Results

The net result of our projection would suggest that China gains around $1.13 trillion¹ in annual export value by 2030 relative to the baseline scenario, while the rest of the world loses around $5.1 trillion, with the G7 accounting for $2.25 trillion of those potential losses alone. This implies that China’s export share gains effectively destroy overall global trade values relative to the status quo ante due to continued declines in export prices.

It is fair to argue that these conclusions are the result of our chosen counterfactual baseline: that export prices will evolve at recent growth rates through 2030. This is true, but we would still argue that it is a reasonable, if not entirely realistic, basis for comparison. The findings are also more useful for considering the distribution of losses across countries and industries, rather than the precise dollar values of the overall adjustments in global trade.

The primary counterfactual scenario emphasizes that China has seen steep declines in export unit values across many HS chapters between 2022 and 2025, while much of the rest of the world has seen increasing export prices. These price changes will likely hit a limit soon. To help address this possibility, we construct another alternative baseline where global export shares and export prices are fixed for all countries, meaning the only variable changing in this case is export volumes. This is a conservative alternative because it yields a much higher baseline estimate for China’s export values (because it eliminates export price declines) and a lower baseline estimate for ROW exports (because it prevents export price increases).

Using this alternative baseline, non-China exporters are still estimated to lose $511 billion in potential export value by 2030, a significant reduction from our $5.1 trillion estimate. But distinct from our original baseline construction, China is now also projected to lose potential export value under this benchmark. We estimate this loss at $482 billion annually by 2030.

Regardless of which assumptions are used, China’s export share gains appear to reduce global total potential export values, because trade patterns are shifting toward Chinese goods that are declining in price.

OECD countries

Our estimated global export value losses are not evenly distributed across countries. Figure 4 shows projected export losses relative to the fixed share/evolving price baseline across the entire OECD. Every country within the OECD suffers potential losses in export values, with the United States and Germany the most exposed to declining trade activity: Each is estimated to lose over $600 billion in potential exports. The average OECD country loses 19.7% of export value relative to estimated exports under our baseline projections.

Again, these estimates should be seen as indicative of where losses in exports should be expected and relative costs between countries, rather than precise projections.

Industries in G7 economies

The impacts of China’s gains in trade share also vary widely by industry. The G7 would see the largest losses in five industries in our test scenario: machinery, vehicles, electrical equipment, steel, and optical equipment (Figure 5). In most of these sectors, the losses in G7 exports implied by our methodology exceed China’s expected gains, and as a result the overall value of global trade in the sector declined. For example, in machinery (HS 84), China is projected to gain $210 billion in exports at the expense of $933 billion in G7 exports. In vehicles (HS 87), China gains $243 billion while the G7 loses $328 billion. And in electrical equipment (HS 85), these figures are $110 billion and $157 billion, respectively.

Costs depend upon export similarity to China

One of the clearest takeaways from our analysis is that the economies losing the most from China’s export gains are those whose exports are directly competitive or similar to China’s. This is an intuitive finding, but it appears well-supported within our analysis and offers more confidence regarding the overall implications.

To calculate our measure of export similarity, we constructed an index that measures the degree of overlap between all countries’ exports and China’s, using the industry composition of each country’s export basket in 2025.² When those individual industry ratios are compared with China’s ratio in the same industry, we take the minimum ratio for each and sum them, indexing to 100. A score of 0 represents completely dissimilar export profiles, and 100 represents an economy with export proportions identical to China’s. Of course, export similarity can change over time as well, as the sectoral composition of countries’ exports shifts.

Our results are presented in Figure 6 (loss in global export share vs. export similarity with China) and Figure 7 (projected loss in potential export value vs. export similarity with China).

The clear finding from our analysis is that countries with export profiles similar to China’s are likely to experience the largest declines in export shares and values if China’s current export trends continue. But the relationship is non-linear, and losses are concentrated in manufacturing economies. Commodity exporters have very little in common with China’s export profile and face low potential losses from the continued growth of China’s exports. Manufacturing-heavy economies such as Germany, Japan, Italy, Poland, and the United States could see much larger losses.

The case for investment and trade defenses

Our projections show that, on current trends, the shift in global trade away from higher-priced G7 and OECD goods toward lower-priced Chinese goods will result in a decline in overall trade values across important sectors through 2030. Cheaper export goods could provide some benefits for consumers, but these trends are devastating for Western economies seeking to preserve their industrial bases. The decline in overall ex-China export values reduces incentives for investment outside of China. If China continues to increase investment while being unable to support domestic demand in its own economy, it will further exacerbate industrial overcapacity, making it more difficult for the rest of the world to find capital and enthusiasm for new investments outside of China.

Our analysis relies upon a hypothetical projection rather than a precise forecast. Extrapolation methodologies are heavily sensitive to the assumptions made and the likelihood that recent trends will continue. We do not systematically evaluate the likelihood that China’s export prices will continue their decline—they probably will vary extensively across industries.

We generally assume that there are sectoral, political, and macroeconomic limits to China’s export growth and the current declines in export prices. But those limits are not emerging yet, and it is useful to evaluate a world in which current trends continue. Indeed, China’s 2026 export shares are already trending above our predictions, and the war in the Persian Gulf has significantly altered price trends.

Regardless, there are some clear findings and implications that emerge from our exercise:

• The combination of China’s export share gains and lower export prices risks an overall decline in the global value of trade in those sectors. Normally, declining export prices can create significant gains in overall trade activity. China would increasingly specialize in goods it can produce at a lower opportunity cost and purchase goods from countries pursuing the same specialization. Cheaper inputs would expand manufacturing opportunities in all countries. But China is commanding an increasing share of global exports while importing relatively less—its surplus continues to grow. The reality of the global economy today is that China’s trade practices are destroying the overall potential of global trade growth and immiserating the manufacturing segments of its trading partners.
• The industries where disinvestment pressures are most acute are those in which China’s export prices are falling and volumes are increasing (see Figure 3 above). China’s export-led growth model is leading directly to de-industrialization in much of the Western world. Beijing’s weaponization of supply chains is producing new political and security threats among China’s trading partners. Plans to restore industrial resilience in the G7 and OECD economies should begin with investments in these industries where pressures from China’s exports are most severe.
• Should China’s export share gains continue, the United States and Germany are most exposed to potential losses, reaching over $600 billion in annual exports by 2030 relative to current trends. Mexico, Italy, the Netherlands, Korea, Japan, and France all stand to lose over $200 billion in annual exports. The United Kingdom and Spain could each lose over $150 billion in exports.
• China’s export share gains are identifiable within distinct sectors. For Western governments, this offers a guide to where new investments are likely to provide the most significant reductions in reliance upon China’s imports (though we can say little about the potential profitability of such investments). Across the G7, the most significant threats to export performance from continued Chinese gains are in machinery, vehicles, electrical equipment, steel, and optical equipment. This means that effective trade defenses do not necessarily need to impact many categories of consumer goods, which can mitigate the inflationary impact of de-risking measures.
• The impacts on emerging economies are distinct from those on advanced economies. This is primarily due to the fact that 1) emerging economies export less overall, meaning that declines in global export share produce an overall smaller magnitude of decline in export value, and 2) the sectors in which China is making the most rapid global export share gains are not the sectors where emerging economies are leading exporters. Certain sectoral losses may still be strong in economies that are increasingly exporting more complex goods (Malaysia and Singapore are both expected to lose tens of billions in potential machinery and electrical equipment exports). China’s export growth across many industrial product categories will make it more difficult for emerging economies to compete effectively and move up the global value chain.