Válka depreciací – Beggar Thy Neighbor: Případová studie Číny a USA v letech 2000 až 2023

This bachelor's thesis analyzes the macroeconomic dispute between the United States of America (USA) and the People's Republic of China over the 2000–2023 period, focusing on whether the exchange rate policy of the People's Bank of China (PBOC) constituted a deliberate 'Beggar-Thy-Neighbor' strategy harming the US current account. The theoretical section of the thesis outlines the historical origins of this strategy, contextualizes Chinese exchange rate policy within the adverse experience of the 1997 Asian Financial Crisis, and critically evaluates the institutional framework of the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Trade Organization (WTO), whose structural deficiencies prevented a definitive legal resolution to the dispute. Furthermore, the thesis chronologically maps the evolution of the US-China economic conflict from China's accession to the WTO up to the escalation of the tariff war between 2018 and 2023. The empirical section employs an Autoregressive Distributed Lag (ARDL) model and an Error Correction Model (ECM) using quarterly data from the FRED and IMF databases for the 2000–2023 period. The results do not support the hypothesis that PBOC’s foreign exchange interventions widened the US current account deficit: the estimated coefficient on the intervention variable is statistically significant in both the short and long run, but carries the opposite sign to that predicted by the hypothesis. It also cannot be interpreted causally due to the risk of reverse causality. China’s real GDP instead emerges as a robust short and long run determinant of the deficit, while the real exchange rate and US real GDP were excluded from the final specification as statistically redundant. The thesis thus provides empirical evidence that the US-China trade dispute cannot be reduced merely to the issue of currency manipulation, but rather reflects deeper structural macroeconomic imbalances.