The Impact of Liberation Day on Europeans’ Beliefs about Tariffs and Trade Policy Preferences

Tom Coupé () and Oleksandr Shepotylo
Additional contact information
Tom Coupé: University of Canterbury, https://www.canterbury.ac.nz

Working Papers in Economics from University of Canterbury, Department of Economics and Finance

Abstract: This paper analyzes how President Trump’s Liberation Day affected attitudes toward trade policy in the European Union. Comparing the attitude of respondents who were interviewed in the days before Liberation Day to the attitude of those interviewed in the days after, our preferred regression specification suggests that Liberation Day led to a 5.7 percentage points increase (from about 42 percent before Liberation Day) in the share of respondents who totally agreed that customs tariffs harm the global economy. At the same time, we find no statistically significant effects on support for a common EU trade policy, EU retaliatory tariffs, or greater rules-based cooperation. Thus, while a major real-world shock had a modest effect on beliefs about trade policy, it did not significantly shift policy preferences.

Keywords: Trade Policy; Attitudes; Liberation Day (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: D72 F13 F14 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 39 pages
Date: 2026-08-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-eec
References: Add references at CitEc
Citations:

Downloads: (external link)
https://repec.canterbury.ac.nz/cbt/econwp/2606.pdf (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:cbt:econwp:26/06

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers in Economics from University of Canterbury, Department of Economics and Finance Private Bag 4800, Christchurch, New Zealand. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Albert Yee ().