A new method based on integer programming for extracting the core paths of China’s production networks

This paper proposes a method to extract the core paths of China’s production networks during U.S.–China trade friction. We find that (i) the shock of U.S.–China trade friction is phased: it weakens the production spillovers along core paths in the year it occurs, but its effects on peripheral paths only become apparent in the following year; (ii) the trade friction shocks the core paths formed by 30.4% of the network’s edges; and (iii) during trade friction, the paths covering just 50% of the network’s edges contribute up to 87.37% of production spillovers.