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London
CNN
—
Today was supposed to be the day that President Donald Trump’s so-called “reciprocal” tariffs on dozens of countries kicked in after a three-month delay, absent trade deals. But their introduction has been postponed, again.
The new, August 1 deadline prolongs uncertainty for businesses but also gives America’s trading partners more time to strike trade deals with the United States, avoiding the hefty levies.
Mainstream economists would probably cheer that outcome. Most have long disliked tariffs and can point to research showing they harm the countries that impose them, including the workers and consumers in those economies. And although they also recognize the problems free trade can create, high tariffs are rarely seen as the solution.
Trump’s tariffs so far have not meaningfully boosted US inflation, slowed the economy or hurt jobs growth. Inflation is “the dog that didn’t bark,” Treasury Secretary Scott Bessent likes to say. But economists argue inflation and jobs will have a delayed reaction to tariffs that could start to get ugly toward the end of the year, and that the current calm before the impending storm has provided the administration with a false sense of security.
“The positives (of free trade) outweigh the negatives, even in rich countries,” Antonio Fatas, an economics professor at business school INSEAD, told CNN. “I think in the US, the country has benefited from being open, Europe has benefited from being open.”
Tariffs are taxes on imports and their most direct typical effect is to drive up costs for producers and prices for consumers.
Around half of all US imports are purchases of so-called intermediate products, needed to make finished American goods, according to data from the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development.
“If you look at a Boeing aircraft, or an automobile manufactured in the US or Canada… it’s really internationally sourced,” Doug Irwin, an economics professor at Dartmouth College, said on the EconTalk podcast in May. And when American businesses have to pay more for imported components, it raises their costs, he added.
Likewise, tariffs raise the cost of finished foreign goods for their American importers.
“Then they have to pass that on to consumers in most instances, because they don’t have deep pockets where they can just absorb a 10 or 20 or 30% tariff,” Irwin said.
This is exactly what happened during Trump’s first term, when he introduced steep tariffs on $283 billion of imports in 2018. A 2019 study, co-authored by Mary Amiti at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, found a “complete pass-through” of those levies into the domestic prices of imported goods.
American consumers lost out as a result.
In the past 20-odd years, generally low US tariffs have meant cheaper imports for Americans, noted Hugh Gimber, global market strategist at J.P. Morgan Asset Management. So much so that prices of goods overall in the US have risen relatively little since 2001, whereas services are now twice as expensive, based on official data compiled by the company. That year is significant as that’s when China joined the World Trade Organization, which was followed by a boom in Chinese exports.
As during Trump’s first term, his new tariffs are widely expected to raise prices in the US. Those forecasters include Federal Reserve Chair Jerome Powell, who said on June 18: “We’ve had goods inflation just moving up a bit and, of course, we do expect to see more of that.”
The levies are also likely to reduce America’s economic output, as has happened before. A 2020 study, based on data from 151 countries, including the US, between 1963-2014, found that tariffs have “persistent adverse effects on the size of the pie,” or the gross domestic product of the country imposing them.
There are a number of possible explanations for this.
One is that, when tariffs are low or non-existent, the country in question can focus on the kind of economic activities where it has an edge and export those goods and services, Gimber told CNN.
“If you raise tariffs, you’re not going to see that same level of specialization,” he said, noting that the result would be lower labor productivity. “The labor could be better used elsewhere in the economy, in areas where you have a greater competitive advantage.”
Another reason output falls when tariffs are raised lies in the higher cost of imported inputs, wrote the authors of the 2020 study, most of them International Monetary Fund economists.
Fatas at INSEAD suggested the same reason, providing an example: “So I’m a worker and work in a factory. To produce what we produce we need to import microchips from Taiwan. Those things are more expensive. Together, me and the company, we create less value per hour worked.”
Yet another way tariff hikes can hurt the economy is by disrupting the status quo and fueling uncertainty over the future levels of import taxes. That lack of clarity is particularly acute this year, given the erratic nature of Trump’s trade policy.
Surveys by the National Federation of Independent Business in the US suggest the uncertainty is already weighing on American companies’ willingness to invest. The share of small businesses planning a capital outlay within the next six months hit its lowest level in April since at least April 2020, when Covid was sweeping the globe.
“The economy will continue to stumble along until the major sources of uncertainty (including over tariffs) are resolved. It’s hard to steer a ship in the fog,” the federation said.
Whichever forces may be at work, the IMF, to cite just one example, thinks higher US tariffs will lower the country’s productivity and output.
But what about the impact of tariffs on job creation? Surprisingly, an increase in import taxes has been found to result in slightly more unemployment across countries.
An example provided by Irwin at Dartmouth College points to one plausible explanation — and it has to do with the steeper cost of imported goods.
“A number of studies have shown, on net, we lost jobs from the (2018) steel tariffs rather than gained jobs because there are more people employed in the downstream user industries than in the steel industry itself,” he said.
A study by the Federal Reserve Board found that a rise in input costs resulting from US tariff hikes in 2018-19 led to job losses in American manufacturing. The damage from those higher expenses was compounded by retaliatory taxes on US exports, more than offsetting a small boost to manufacturing employment from US tariffs — at least so far, the 2024 paper said.
Retaliation by other countries is indeed another danger of pulling the tariff lever. Higher tariffs on American exports would typically raise their prices for foreign consumers, hitting demand for the goods in many cases.
When Trump announced new tariffs this year, America’s major trading partners were quick to strike back with their own levies, although the US then agreed a temporary truce with China and the European Union.
While economists generally agree that free trade has benefited the global economy in recent decades, they acknowledge that it comes with certain costs.
One is the loss of jobs in communities that are particularly exposed to new competition from foreign manufacturers.
That is similar to the impact of technological progress on workers. “Manufacturing jobs as a share of the labor force have come down everywhere. It isn’t a US-specific story,” said Gimber at JPMorgan Asset Management, pointing to automation.
He drew a parallel between helping workers affected by higher imports and what is known as a just transition — the idea that the drastic changes needed to move toward a greener economy should be fair to everyone and minimize harm to workers and communities.
In both cases, providing workers in impacted industries with new skills or retraining them could be key, Gimber said.
Another potential cost of free trade is dependency on far-flung manufacturers. That took on new relevance during the pandemic, which snarled global supply chains, contributing to shortages of products such as face masks and respirators in the US and elsewhere.
However, economists do not typically see tariffs as a good way to build up domestic manufacturing, Fatas at INSEAD said, noting that subsidies for specific industries are viewed as a better tool “because they work more directly.”
But perhaps the strongest argument in favor of free trade is its importance to maintaining peace between nations.
As Gimber’s colleague David Kelly noted in March, closer trade relations give countries more to lose in any conflict.
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