Abstract
The U.S.-China trade friction in 2018 and the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020 have significantly influenced China’s domestic supply chains, with their impacts varying considerably across regions and sectors. Multi-regional input-output (MRIO) models are widely used to track supply chains and analyze cross-regional spillover effects, playing a key role in understanding economic linkages and environmental impacts. However, due to data unavailability, existing MRIO tables fail to capture the impact of the U.S.-China trade friction and the COVID-19 pandemic on China’s regional supply chains. To address this data gap, we employ hybrid methods to construct Chinese MRIO tables for 2018 and 2020, covering 31 regions and 42 sectors. This dataset is consistent with our previous work on the China provincial MRIO model for the years 2012, 2015, and 2017, offering insights into how regional supply chains and economic structures adapted to the combined impacts of the trade war and the COVID-19 pandemic.
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Data availability
These MRIO tables are publicly available via the China Emission Accounts and Datasets (CEADs, www.ceads.net) and Figshare46 (https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.29927291).
Code availability
The programs used in the data generation is based on MATLAB and GAMS. The code can be found in https://github.com/LiJie20230/China_MRIO.
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Acknowledgements
We sincerely acknowledge the support of the Carbon Neutrality and Energy System Transformation programme and the anonymous reviewers. This research was funded by the National Key R&D Program of China (2023YFE0113000), National Natural Science Foundation of China (72361137002,72522023) and the Energy Economics Submission Fee Fund (0140-9883/©2025 Elsevier B.V.). Additional funding was provided by the European Union under grant agreement no. 101137905 (PANTHEON) and the Research Grants Council of the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region, China (AoE/P-601/23-N). D.G. acknowledges the support by the New Cornerstone Science Foundation through the Xplorer Prize and the AXA Chair Grant.
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H.Z. designed the study and led the project. J.L. conducted the modelling. J.L., Z.Z., D.L., Q.O., P.T., D.G., and H.Z. contributed to the writing. J.L., Z.Z., and H.Z. collected the raw data.
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Li, J., Zhang, Z., Liang, D. et al. China’s Provincial Multi-Regional Input-Output Database for 2018 and 2020. Sci Data (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-06543-y
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41597-025-06543-y
