Chinese exports, product/firm level export prices, pass-through, international oligopolies, profitabilities

P00, E24, F14

By means of a fine-grained dataset linking exported product-level and firm-level data, this pa- per reconstructs the Chinese accumulation regimes at the microlevel in the period 2000-2013. After documenting a few macro stylized facts on the Chinese export-led accumulation regime in terms of the trend of Chinese exports in international markets, and the appreciation in the terms of trade in manufacturing products, the paper gives evidence of a process of restructuring of exporting firms towards more complex products and sectors, against any hypothesis of a purported price dumping in international markets. The positive relationship between technological content of the exported product and pricing markup strategies confirms the Sylos-Labini hypothesis linking prices and technological advantage, yielding the formation of international oligopolies able to exercise forms of market power and setting prices well-above any competitive level. As such, the trend in export prices has signalled the progressive capacity of the Chinese firms to orient the patterns of interna- tional market penetration, particularly in most complex productions