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Unless you subscribe to the Economist, it is unlikely (I think) that you can read this article entirely. But, it seems to be a subject that interests many on this forum, so I have excerpted snippets, which follow:
Sub-headliner: America’s economy benefits hugely from trade. But its costs have been amplified by policy failures
Since the 1980s, America’s economy has gradually opened up to cheap imports. This accelerated in 1993, when President Bill Clinton signed the North American Free-Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Mexico and Canada. The deal, America’s first broad trade accord to include a poor economy, eliminated most tariffs on trade between the three countries over a decade. Coincidentally, within a year of the start of tariff reductions, the peso collapsed, making Mexican imports cheaper still. Excluding fuel (which America had to buy from somewhere) imports from Mexico grew by about five times between 1993 and 2013, according to the Peterson Institute, a think-tank. Exports to Mexico grew by about three-and-a-half times. As a result of the disparity, a bilateral trade deficit worth $23 billion (then, 0.2% of America’s GDP) opened up within five years.
Many blamed the yuan’s peg to the dollar for creating a trade imbalance. By 2014 China had accumulated nearly $4 trillion in foreign currency to sustain the peg. Economists have always struggled to formalise the allegation that China manipulates the yuan. Over time, higher wage inflation in booming China should undermine the advantage of a weak currency. Wages have indeed risen much faster in China than in the West. China’s current-account surplus, which reached 10% of GDP in 2007, is often cited as proof of fiddling. But Chinese surpluses and American deficits are—as a matter of accounting—the difference between saving and investment in those countries. So China’s vast surpluses in part reflected its extraordinary propensity to save.
In any case, cheap imports were a windfall for American consumers. Excluding food and energy, prices of goods have fallen almost every year since NAFTA. Clothes now cost the same as they did in 1986; furnishing a house is as cheap as it was 35 years ago. More trade brought more choice, too. Robert Lawrence and Lawrence Edwards, two economists, estimate that trade with China alone put $250 a year into the pocket of every American by 2008. The gains from cheap stuff flowed disproportionately to the less well-off, because the poor spend more of their incomes on goods than the rich.
For other economists, the impact of trade on jobs was a growing concern. The sharp decline in American manufacturing employment began in 2000, just as Chinese imports took off (see chart). Yet on the extreme assumption that every dollar spent on imports replaced a dollar spent employing an American, Mr Lawrence calculates that between 2000 and 2007 Chinese imports caused, at most, 188,000 of 484,000 annual manufacturing-job losses. A recent, more detailed, estimate by Daron Acemoglu, David Autor and others chalks up about 1m of 5.5m manufacturing jobs lost between 1999 and 2011 to Chinese competition (with similar-sized job losses in other industries).
Mirror Image:
How does this bear on today’s trade-policy debates? Economists were wrong to think in the 1990s that the concentrated costs of trade, which textbooks always predicted, had somehow been avoided. It is now clear that they can be, in fact, worse than first thought. But the gains from trade, which are larger still, were never an illusion. Trade sceptics sometimes seem to suggest that workers were better-off before the 1980s, because protectionism was rife but growth stayed high. Yet living standards today are far higher. Trade barriers, which prevent such advances, are a futile, self-defeating way to help the unskilled.