There's a myth that the U.S.-China WTO Agreement is only for big multinational corporations who can't wait to ship jobs to Chinese workers earning 25 cents an hour. I want to dispel that myth right here and right now. These exporters generated 35 percent of the dollar volume of all U.S. exports to China in 1997. This figure is higher than the small business exporter dollar volume share of overall U.S. exports, which was 30.6 percent.
China is the third largest growth market for small business exporters.
In fact, the number of small businesses exporting to China grew by a remarkable 141 percent between 1992 and 1997. Plus, the value of small business exports to China more than doubled between 1992 and 1997. What's even more amazing about these statistics is that they do not count all the small business suppliers to larger firms that export to China. If you add in this dimension, the extent of small business involvement in trade with China is staggering. Today we will look behind the rhetoric and the trade statistics to see if trade with China, and more specifically, the recently negotiated U.S.-China World Trade Organization Accession Agreement benefits small business.