Trump started a trade war with China in 2018 by imposing tariffs on a broad range of Chinese imports.
If we calculate the economic win/loss for reach side, which country lost/benefited more as of 2022: China or the USA?
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Sign up to join this communityTrump started a trade war with China in 2018 by imposing tariffs on a broad range of Chinese imports.
If we calculate the economic win/loss for reach side, which country lost/benefited more as of 2022: China or the USA?
Since the original stated reason for the trade war was the deficit USA had in trade with China, we can evaluate the results based on U.S. Census Bureau data.
Year | Balance ($bn) |
---|---|
2017 | -375167.9 |
2018 | -418232.9 |
2019 | -342629.5 |
2020 | -308139.5 |
2021 | -353493.2 |
2022(Jan-May) | -163149.7 |
To clarify the last value - for the same period in 2021, the deficit amounted to roughly -$129T, i.e. we see ~1.2 increase of deficit compared to previous year.
The Chinese COVID lockdowns of 2020 noticeably impacted the balance during February-April of 2020, but the data shows that after April 2020 the values are consistent with 2019 values; I would assume the recession due to pandemic dampened the growth somewhat.
Thus, we can see that while deficit shrunk somewhat during the trade war, the deficit is increasing again since 2020, even though most tariffs are still in place. In other words, USA did not manage to meet its goal of balancing out exports with imports, and China still exports more to USA than imports from it; moreover, the trend is still in favor of China, based on first months of 2022.