Replicate Data for Trade Disputes and the Dynamics of Public International Trust

We measure the tariff shocks by matching the U.S. products of Section 301 Tariffs with China provincial customs export data in 2017, the year before the trade war.First, based on the tariffed product lists released by the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR), which specify products at the Harmonized Tariff Schedule (HTS) eight-digit code level, we calculate the proportion of tariffed product categories under each six-digit HTS code. For instance, under the U.S. HTS-6 code 6309.29 (tents of other textile material), the corresponding sub-code includes 6306.29.11 (tents of cotton) and 6306.29.21 (tents made of other materials), with only 6306.29.11 being subject to additional tariffs. Thus, the tariffed rate for HTS code 6309.29 is 50%.Second, since the HTS-6 codes are consistent under the Harmonized System (HS) across countries, we estimate the scale of Chinese export affected by the trade war by multiplying the export data of HS-6 products by the corresponding HTS-6 tariffed rate.Third, we further adjust for provincial differences by dividing each province’s tariff-affected export scale by its total export scale.Fourth, the intensity of tariffs varied across the four rounds of the trade war. In the first three rounds, listed products were subjected to a 25% tariff, whereas the fourth round, while covering nearly all remaining U.S.-bound exports, had a lower tariff rate (7.5%), following the signing of the “Phase One” trade agreement between China and the U.S. in January 2020. To account for these differences, we assign a weight of 0.25 to the first three rounds and a weight of 0.075 to the fourth round. The weighted sum serves as a proxy variable for the provincial exposure of the U.S.-China trade war.