The welfare effects of service trade liberalization: evidence from the Chinese movie industry

We examine the welfare effect of trade liberalization in the service industry by focusing on the Chinese movie industry. China has been maintaining an import quota of foreign movies since 1990s. Using a unique Chinese movie dataset, we first estimate a nested logit demand model. And based on the estimated demand parameters, we perform counterfactual tests by removing the movie import quota. Specifically, we quantify the loss to the domestic film makers due to greater competition with foreign competitors, and the gains to consumers from consuming more high quality movies. We find that after trade liberalization, the market share of domestic film makers falls by 21-22% on average during the sample period, whereas the gain in the consumer welfare is comparatively smaller with an increase of around 5-9%. We also find that if the domestic film makers react actively by either strategically changing the release dates or by improving the quality of the home-made movies, then the magnitude of decline in the producer welfare will reduce by a large extent.