Asking about China tariffs in 2019 seems like it the sort of extremely partisan topic that the typically very good IGM can struggle with. I wonder if the answer might be different if the question was instead asked today, as now that Biden has endorsed Trump’s strategy the partisan valence may have changed.
To be honest I’m not familiar with the direct evidence either so I’m mostly relying on secondhand impressions and general descriptions of tariff burdens falling on consumers. I searched around briefly just now and found this paper (also cited in the paper you linked as Amiti et al. (2020b)) which reports:
Using another year of data including significant escalations in the trade war, we find that U.S. tariffs continue to be almost entirely borne by U.S. firms and consumers.
However it’s not clear to me what the relationship is between tariff burden and the welfare loss estimates you mentioned in your comment. It seems to me like they could be measuring different things.
Asking about China tariffs in 2019 seems like it the sort of extremely partisan topic that the typically very good IGM can struggle with. I wonder if the answer might be different if the question was instead asked today, as now that Biden has endorsed Trump’s strategy the partisan valence may have changed.
Agree. And not just because it was initiated by Trump, but because of a general aversion to such policies.
I didn’t have access to your link but I found another version of it here.
To be honest I’m not familiar with the direct evidence either so I’m mostly relying on secondhand impressions and general descriptions of tariff burdens falling on consumers. I searched around briefly just now and found this paper (also cited in the paper you linked as Amiti et al. (2020b)) which reports:
However it’s not clear to me what the relationship is between tariff burden and the welfare loss estimates you mentioned in your comment. It seems to me like they could be measuring different things.
Thanks. Tbc I don’t have a strong view on the object-level issue. I just thought it would be good to have more evidence than that early survey.
That makes sense, I agree it’s better to have more direct sources.