The Best Kept Secrets About US Trade

The Best Kept Secrets About US Trade by Alan Reynolds, Foundation For Economic Education

Half of US Imports Are Inputs for American Manufacturing

William Galston’s Wall Street Journal column, “Why Trade Critics Are Getting Traction,” asks why US employment in manufacturing fell from 17.2 million in December 2000 to 12.3 million last year. He suggests that “import penetration from China [not Mexico] has been responsible for up to 20% of U.S. job losses.”

But “up to” 20 percent explains very little, and that figure is at the high end of a range of estimates from a working paper by Autor, Dorn and Hanson for 1999-2011. They speculate that “had import competition not grown after 1999” then there would have been 10...