Introduction: Insights from US-China trade and technological change

The United States and China currently dominate world trade. While this has implications for trade between other nations, it also has implications for other aspects of the global economy like the labor market and product innovation. In fact, recent advances in information technology and artificial intelligence have profound implications on employment, productivity, wages, and other labor market outcomes in both advanced and emerging economies. By affecting the demand and supply of different goods and services, US-China trade plays an important role here. This special issue brings together a number of papers that explore the impact of trade and technological change on, among other things, labor markets both at the economy wide and local level in China and the US. Another set of papers explores what happens to innovation and its implications for China’s future trade capabilities.