This research empirically examines the impact of China's Renminbi (RMB) bilateral swap agreements (BSAs) on the usage of the currency in cross-border trade transactions. By using a unique dataset from SWIFT including cross-border settlement messages of 91 countries/regions between October 2010 and November 2015, we confirm that the signing of a RMB BSA helps to increase the number, the value and the proportion of RMB settlement in cross-border trade. Our results are robust with respect to the choice of different models, including multi-level mixed model, two-stage regression model, and difference-indifference model. In addition to justifying the effectiveness of China's BSA-signing strategy to promote the RMB usage in trade settlement, our results clarify that the signing of those RMB BSAs is not purely for China's political ends as some scholars claim.

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Purpose The purpose of this paper is to deploy an export dependency index to identify the sectors and countries in Latin America which are most exposed to fluctuations in Chinese demand. Bilateral trade between China and Latin America has grown very quickly in the past decade. As a consequence, economic relationships with Latin America intensified tremendously, as growing demand for resources drove China into relatively unexplored frontiers. Design/methodology/approach The Index measures the relative exposure of Latin American exporters to shifts in demand from China and is scaled from 0 to 1 (the higher the score, the more exposed an exporter is to disruptions of trade with China). The authors undertook the analysis using six-digit trade figures from the United Nations COMTRADE database (Harmonized System 2007 nomenclature) to ensure granularity and consistency and contrasted their results across two points in time, 2008 and 2014. The analysis was very comprehensive, covering the products that accounted for 80 per cent or more of all exports to China in 2014, for all countries in Latin America and the Caribbean. Findings According to our estimates, dependency on China increased overboard across Latin America for all countries and all sectors between 2008 and 2014. Absolute dependency levels were highest in Costa Rica, Colombia, Uruguay, Venezuela, Brazil, Panama, Peru, Chile, Guyana and Argentina. Of these, the largest exporters to China, namely, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Peru, Colombia and Venezuela, featured high dependencies concentrated around just four commodities: soy in the form of soybeans and soybean oil; crude oil; copper in the form of copper ore, copper cathodes and unrefined copper; and iron ore. These four commodities accounted for 80 per cent of the regions’ total exports to China. Originality/value This is one of few studies that look into Latin America’s commodity export dependency on China at such granular level.

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