US “Reciprocal Tariffs”: What Do They Mean?
By Ian Sheldon (sheldon.1@osu.edu) Currently the United States is on course to deviate from its World Trade Organization (WTO) commitments by unilaterally resetting all of its previously bound tariffs, President Trump referring to these as “reciprocal tariffs”. However, the interpretation…
Could US Buyers Bear the Cost of Import Tariffs?
By Ian Sheldon (sheldon.1@osu.edu) To trade economists this seems a rather odd question, the answer to which would be: well of course tariffs impose costs on buyers (consumers and firms purchasing inputs), and the basic explanation can be found in…
The Future of Dispute Resolution in International (Agricultural)Trade
By Ian Sheldon (sheldon.1@osu.edu) Although commentators argue about the status of the World Trade Organization (WTO) compared to free trade agreements (FTAs), there is consensus that WTO dispute resolution has been its “crown jewel”. Key is the two-instance adjudication system,…
Will Proposed US Tariffs Hurt US Farmers?
By Ian Sheldon (sheldon.1@osu.edu) In a previous post (Ian Sheldon, “Do US Buyers Bear the Cost of Import Tariffs?”), it was shown that based on analysis of the 2018-19 trade war with China, US buyers bore the cost of US…
Do US Buyers Bear the Cost of Import Tariffs?
By Ian Sheldon (sheldon.1@osu.edu) To trade economists this seems a rather odd question, the answer to which would be: well of course tariffs impose costs on buyers (consumers and firms purchasing inputs), and the basic explanation can be found in…
“Power-Based” Bargaining Over Trade: What Has Been the Economic Cost?
The U.S.-China trade war represents a natural experiment in the sense that we have not seen such wide-ranging increases in tariffs since the 1930s, when Congress passed the Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act (Bown and Zhang, 2019). Not surprisingly, applied trade economists…
“Power-Based” Bargaining Over Trade: Myopic Behavior by the United States?
Analysis of the current administration’s trade policy choices has typically interpreted them in terms of a zero-sum game, i.e., rather than generating mutual benefits in a positive-sum game, international trade is a game where economically, one country is a winner…
China’s Agricultural Import Commitments: Inefficient “Managed” Trade?
In light of the sectors targeted by China’s retaliatory tariffs against U.S. imports, it is not surprising that agriculture was a critical component of the Phase One Trade Agreement between the U.S. and China, that went into effect on February…
The U.S.-China trade war: why not go back to the WTO?
Last week, bilateral trade talks in Washington D.C. ended with China inviting the U.S. to send a negotiating team to Beijing this month (The Guardian, January 31, 2019). The headline news from the talks was that the Chinese delegation offered…
What does “reciprocity” in trade negotiations actually mean?
Among several issues raised by the Administration’s unfolding approach to trade policy, one really caught my eye last week when Representative Sean P. Duffy of Wisconsin proposed granting the President new executive powers to raise tariffs on U.S. imports, stating…
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