Rising Import Tariffs, Falling Export Growth: When Modern Supply Chains Meet Old-Style Protectionism

Kyle Handley, Fariha Kamal and Ryan Monarch

Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies

Abstract: We examine the impacts of the 2018-2019 U.S. import tariff increases on U.S. export growth through the lens of supply chain linkages. Using 2016 confidential firm-trade linked data, we document the implied incidence and scope of new import tariffs. Firms that eventually faced tariff increases on their imports accounted for 84% of all exports and represented 65% of manufacturing employment. For all affected firms, the implied cost is $900 per worker in new duties. To estimate the effect on U.S. export growth, we construct product-level measures of import tariff exposure of U.S. exports from the underlying firm micro data. More exposed products experienced 2 percentage point lower growth relative to products with no exposure. The decline in exports is equivalent to an ad valorem tariff on U.S. exports of almost 2% for the typical product and almost 4% for products with higher than average exposure.

Keywords: Global supply chains; tariffs; trade war; U.S. exports (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: F1 F13 F14 F23 H2 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Pages: 43 pages
Date: 2020-01
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-int
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (57)

Downloads: (external link)
https://www2.census.gov/ces/wp/2020/CES-WP-20-01.pdf First version, 2020 (application/pdf)

Related works:
Working Paper: Rising Import Tariffs, Falling Export Growth: When Modern Supply Chains Meet Old-Style Protectionism (2020)
Working Paper: Rising Import Tariffs, Falling Export Growth: When Modern Supply Chains Meet Old-Style Protectionism (2020)
Working Paper: Rising Import Tariffs, Falling Export Growth: When Modern Supply Chains Meet Old-Style Protectionism (2020)
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:cen:wpaper:20-01

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in Working Papers from U.S. Census Bureau, Center for Economic Studies Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Dawn Anderson ().