1/5 Bloomberg: "The scale of the problem is staggering. Trade data released Thursday showed a record $112 billion gap between what China reported exporting to the US and what US Customs said actually arrived last year." bloomberg.com/news/features/…
2/5 "Put simply," Bloomberg continues, "that suggests that as much as a quarter of what Asia’s top economy shipped to American shores last year slipped under the tariff radar."
3/5 It also suggests why a hodgepodge of sectoral and bilateral tariffs are less efficient than a simple tariff on all imports. While the former mostly shift trade around, the latter is equivalent to a currency devaluation for a country that doesn't intervene in its currency.
4/5 Even better would be a Tobin tax on gross capital inflows along the lines John Hansen has proposed (the market access charge). This would have exactly the same impact on reducing the US trade deficit and supporting...
5/5 US manufacturing as a simple tariff on all imports, except that it would shift the direct cost from consumers to bankers and financial investors (which, of course, is why it would be so hard to implement).
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1/6 Bloomberg: "Instead of fighting over quotas and rules, officials should be rolling up their sleeves and thinking honestly about where the EU has a fighting chance of competing — not “picking winners, but letting the losers go.”" bloomberg.com/opinion/articl…
2/6 This might be perfectly good advice in a "normal" trading environment, in which countries maximize exports in order to maximize imports and domestic consumption, trade is broadly balanced, and production shifts according to comparative advantage.
3/6 But that is not the world we live in. Consider China. It accounts for roughly 18% of global GDP, only 13% of global consumption, and a massive 31% of global manufacturing.
But it did not get there by “picking winners, and letting the losers go.”
1/4 As this WSJ article points out, countries are keeping their exports competitive in the face of US tariffs by increasingly subsidizing them, with the subsidies ultimately being paid for in the form of suppressed consumption. wsj.com/economy/trade/…
2/4 This means that we are increasingly caught up in a globalized Kalecki Paradox: when one country subsidizes manufacturing exports at the expense of wage growth, it can grow more quickly, but when all countries do it, they collectively grow more slowly. engelsbergideas.com/notebook/europ…
3/4 That's because by reducing demand, they are also reducing demand for their exports. They have to double down to remain competitive, even as a collective doubling down worsens the overall outcome.
As the article points out, this makes the US deficit the key variable.
1/7 Reuters: "China's biggest solar firms shed nearly one-third of their workforces last year, company filings show, as one of the industries hand-picked by Beijing to drive economic growth grapples with falling prices and steep losses." reuters.com/business/world…
2/7 "The job cuts illustrate the pain from the vicious price wars being fought across Chinese industries as they grapple with overcapacity and tepid demand. The world produces twice as many solar panels each year as it uses, with most of them produced in China."
3/7 With Chinese manufacturing competitiveness so dependent on the very transfers that weaken domestic demand, China and the world are caught in a trap. The world cannot continue to absorb a Chinese manufacturing sector that is growing so much faster than domestic demand.
2/5 That is exactly how it should be. Tariffs are effectively a tax on consumption and a subsidy to production (of tariffed goods). They work by transferring income from households (net importers) to producers of tradable goods.
3/5 The idea that Trump's tariffs would be paid for by foreigners was always nonsense. If they were, as I have often pointed out, they would have little to no impact on trade flows or on American deindustrialization.
1/7 My latest piece was written for friends who are EU policymakers or advisors. In it I argue that there is a difference between an inefficient manufacturing sector and a globally uncompetitive manufacturing sector. We shouldn't conflate the two. engelsbergideas.com/notebook/europ…
2/7 A country's manufacturing sector is not globally uncompetitive because it is inefficient, but rather because its wages are higher relative to productivity than those of its trade partners.
Efficiency is about how effectively an economy uses resources to create value.
3/7 Global competitiveness, by contrast, depends largely on how income is distributed within an economy.
This leaves the EU with two options if it wants to prevent domestic deindustrialization.
1/4 Very interesting and timely paper. The authors find that "industrial policies lead to trade surpluses if the government pursues an unbalanced policy mix, such that domestic demand does not rise as much as supply. These surpluses are absorbed by the rest of the world, which...
2/4 in response runs trade deficits. Absent policy interventions, trade deficits reduce the competitiveness of the domestic tradable sector, stifling innovation and productivity growth. Innovation policies can help the rest of the world to mitigate these negative spillovers."
3/4 In other words countries whose trade surpluses are caused by manufacturing subsidies (paid for by households) force their trade partners to absorb negative spillovers in the form of trade deficits that undermine their manufacturing competitiveness. bw.bse.eu/wp-content/upl…