(p. A21) One of the hardest things to accept for all of us who want Donald Trump to be a one-term president is the fact that some things are true even if Donald Trump believes them! And one of those things is that we have a real trade problem with China. Imports of Chinese goods alone equal two-thirds of the global U.S. trade deficit today.
. . .
. . . , I sat down with David Autor, the M.I.T. economist who’s done some of the most compelling research on the impacts of China trade. The first problem he raised has to do with the “shock” that China delivered to U.S. lower-tech manufacturers in the years right after Beijing joined the World Trade Organization in 2001, when it gained more open access to the U.S. and other world markets.
. . .
Autor and his colleagues David Dorn and Gordon Hanson found in a 2016 study that roughly 40 percent of the decline in U.S. manufacturing between 2000 and 2007 was due to a surge in imports from China primarily after it joined the W.T.O. And it led to the sudden loss of about one million factory jobs in Ohio, Michigan, Wisconsin and Pennsylvania. Trump won all of those states.
This “China shock,” said Autor, led not only to mass unemployment but also to social disintegration, less marriage, more opioid abuse and more people dropping out of the labor market and requiring government aid. “International trade creates diffuse benefits and concentrated costs,” he added. “China’s rapid rise, while enormously positive for world welfare, has created identifiable losers in trade-impacted industries and the labor markets in which they are located.”
The second problem has to do with access to China’s market for the goods U.S. companies sell. There, noted Autor, “China has not only taken our lunch, they’ve opened a restaurant that’s serving it to their citizens.”
. . . China kept a 25 percent tariff on new cars imported from the U.S. (our tariff is 2.5 percent) and similarly steep tariffs on imported auto parts.
For the full commentary, see:
Friedman, Thomas L.. “Trump’s Right About China, To a Point.” The New York Times (Wednesday, March 14, 2018): A21.
(Note: ellipses added; italics in original.)
(Note: the online version of the commentary has the date March 13, 2018, and has the title “Some Things Are True Even if Trump Believes Them.” My print edition is in this case, and is almost always, the National Edition. I have discovered that sometimes the page number, and even the title and date, differ between the National and the New York print editions.)
The Autor co-authored paper mentioned above, is:
Autor, David H., David Dorn, and Gordon H. Hanson. “The China Shock: Learning from Labor Market Adjustment to Large Changes in Trade.” Annual Review of Economics (2016): 205-40.