The U.S./China Trade Debate and Populist Backlash
Posted at Debate Central, Cross-Examination
Economists Tyler Cowen & Noah Smith at Bloomberg are “Debating Free Trade and the Populist Backlash” (November 1, 2016 1:16 PM EDT).
For NSDA (and NCFCA) debaters, the benefits, costs, and pushback on U.S./China trade is at the center of economic and diplomatic relations with China. Alan Reynolds in the Wall Street Journal “What the China Trade Warriors Get Wrong” (Oct. 26, 2016 7:21 p.m. ET) says Trump advisor Peter Navarro is wrong in claiming the “U.S. and Europe in particular got the short end of that stick” after China joined the WTO in 2001:
… China joining the WTO had zero effect on U.S. tariffs against Chinese imports. But it did force China to cut weighted-average tariffs to 19.8% in 1996, down from 32.2% in 1992, according to World Bank estimates. They shrunk further to 14.6% in 2000 and 3.2% by 2014. Yet U.S. tariffs remained unchanged by China’s entry into WTO, staying between 2% and 3% on a weighted average.
Reynolds notes however, that joining the WTO did have a big short-term impact in China:
They found that China’s “aggressive restructuring led to the layoffs of 45 million workers between 1995 and 2002, including 36 million from the state sector.” If China’s entrance to the WTO was about “stealing jobs,” it certainly got off to a bad start. Even in the world’s most populous country, those tens of millions of lost jobs had a big effect.
Did U.S. imports surge after China joined the WTO? Reynolds quotes a recent front-page WSJ story: “Imports from China as a percentage of U.S. economic output doubled within four years of China joining the World Trade Organization in 2001. . . . By last year, imports from China equaled 2.7% of U.S. gross domestic product.” (How the China Shock, Deep and Swift, Spurred the Rise of Trump). But Reynolds says this is misleading and instead U.S. exports to China surged:
Those numbers might appear to suggest U.S. imports surged after 2001, but it was actually Chinese imports that exploded. China’s global imports jumped to 29.2% of GDP in 2005, according to the World Bank, up from 18.3% in 2001. Meantime, U.S. exports of goods to China quickly rose from $19.2 billion in 2001 to $69.7 billion in 2008, according to the Bureau of Economic Analysis. With services added, the U.S. exported $169.2 billion worth of goods and services to China by 2014.
U.S. imports were 15.5% of GDP in 2005 and the main shift was reduced imports from Japan as imports from China rose:
A decade later, U.S. imports were still 15.5% of GDP—the same as 2005. The fact that China’s share of U.S. imports was up and Japan’s down did not mean the U.S. was importing more.