1、特朗普经济学与中美贸易失衡外文文献翻译特朗普经济学与中美贸易失衡中英文英文Trump economics and ChinaUS trade imbalancesJustin YifuLin1.IntroductionThe trade deficit of the Unites States, as shown inFig, expanded from around zero before mid-1970s to peak in 2006 at $761 billion, which was around 5% of the US GDP. The trade deficit of goo
2、ds was even larger, peaking at $837 billion in 2006. Though this value decreased after the 2008 global financial crisis, it was still at a remarkably high level as $752 billion in 2016.The trade imbalances between US and Japan and other industrialized economies contributed most to the rising US trad
3、e deficits before the 1980s, while in recent years the US runs deficits mainly against emerging Asian economies and oil-producing economies. President Trump argues that the US trade deficit was caused by unfavorable trade agreements against the US and pledges to eliminate them by bilateral renegotia
4、tions or unilateral actions.The USChina trade imbalance has been a prime concern of President Trump ever since his election campaign in 2015. The official data provided by the US Census Bureau shows that China, the emerging major player in the process of globalization, has been running a trade surpl
5、us with the US since 1984. Chinas trade balance with the US increased from a trade surplus of $0.06 billion in 1985 to a trade surplus of $347.02 billion in 2016, which represented 44% of US trade deficit in that year. This large imbalance has caused considerable pressure on the USChina trade relati
6、ons. One major concern is the impacts of imports from China on US domestic employment. One highly cited work byAutor, Dorn, and Hanson (2013)shows that the exposure to imports from China had negative impacts on USs manufacturing employment. President Trump pledged in his election campaign to impose
7、45% border tax on imports from China as a measure to reduce the USChina trade imbalances and to retain jobs in the US.Would imposing draconian tariffs on imports from China help reduce US total trade deficit? Would the reduction of US trade deficit with China bring manufacturing jobs back to the US?
8、 The answer to these questions depends on what cause the persistent trade imbalances.The causes of rising US trade deficit have been discussed intensively. Existing literature provides theoretical and empirical support for several key factors, such as the lack of investment opportunities in emerging
9、 economies, undervalued exchange rates against the US dollar to the currencies of several emerging economies, the increase in the price of the primary commodities and the over-consumption caused by financial deregulation and supported by US dollar as a major global reserve currency.This paper focuse
10、s specifically on trade imbalances between the US and China and investigates how Chinascomparative advantagein the labor-intensive manufacturing activities, combined with the global production sharing across economies with China as the assembly hub, works as the major source of the increasing bilate
11、ral trade imbalances between US and China. In particular, this paper first analyzes the bilateral trade patterns between US and its main trading partners and finds that East Asia is traditionally the main source of USs trade deficits. The paper further finds a declining share of USEast Asia trade im
12、balances in US total trade deficit during the period when the USChina trade imbalances was rising. It also reveals negative correlation between US trade deficit with China and China with some other East Asian economies. Based on these findings, our paper attributes the sharp increase in USChina trad
13、e imbalances to the reallocation of labor-intensive production activities from Japan and Asian newly industrialized economies (NIEs), namely South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong, Taiwan, China, to China, epitomized by the USs dramatic expansion of overall trade deficit.The USChina trade imbalances were
14、 also exacerbated by the production sharing across borders in East Asia with China as the assembly hub. A growing strand of literature considers the value-added contents as an indicator for international production fragmentation and a more objective assessment of the relative distribution of economi
15、c benefits from trade between two trading partner economies (Daudin, Rifflart, & Schweisguth, 2011;Hummels, Ishii, & Yi, 2001;Johnson & Noguera, 2012). The idea of value-added contents of trade is based on models of sequential multi-stage production with stages split across economies. With flows of
16、final products and intermediates co-existing, production fragmentation across economies generates discrepancy between gross and value-added trade flows. Traditionally, the focus of public interest is on the bilateral trade balance. However, with trade flows of intermediates across economies, the val
17、ue of gross exports might overestimate the domestic economic benefits of exports to the exporting country and ignores the indirect impacts from other economies. Therefore, in addition to the bilateral trade balance, this paper carefully discusses patterns of bilateral trade flows measured in value-a
18、dded contents, with data inJohnson and Noguera (2012)andJohnson (2014).Moreover, given that the difference in comparative advantages across economies is one of the main incentives of global production sharing, this paper examines the bilateral trade balances at the sector level. The results show tha
19、t only in sectors that China has comparative advantages there is persistent bilateral trade imbalance between China and US. In addition, other economies that has low labor costs share the same trade pattern as that of China. We argue that the root of US trade deficit is not Chinasexchange rate polic
20、yand other trade manipulations as President Trump pledged. Therefore, raisingtrade barriersfor Chinas imports to the US will not help mitigate the US total trade deficits.This paper is organized as follows. In Section2, we review several explanations for US trade deficits. Sector3presents the curren
21、t status of the total USChina trade imbalances, and we further examine its domestic value-added contents in Section4. In Section5we conduct our analysis by sectors and apply the analysis to other economies. We also discuss the evolution of Chinas comparative advantages in thelow-wagelabor intensive
22、sector. Section6concludes.2.Main explanations for US trade deficits in existing literatureThe causes of US trade deficits have been extensively discussed. In this section, we will review several main strands of existing literature. The first strand of literature considers the trade imbalances as the
23、 results of economic distortions rather than an “equilibrium” phenomenon. Therefore, the trade imbalances could only be resolved with policy adjustments. For example, a series papers byObstfeld and Rogoff, 2000,Obstfeld and Rogoff, 2005andRogoff (2006)discuss the changes in exchange rate that are re
24、quired to reduce the imbalances.The second strand of literature considering global imbalances as an “equilibrium” condition, marked with the hypothesis of a global “saving-glut” proposed byBernanke (2005). Different explanations of the “saving glut” have been raised.Caballero, Farhi, and Gourinchas
25、(2008), for example, develops a model with heterogeneity across economies in their ability to supply safe assets.Mendoza, Quadrini, and Rios-Rull (2009)also focuses on the different levels of financial development, but emphasizes heterogeneity in the demand of assets and their model predicts increas
26、ed financial integration raises foreign demand for US assets. Fogli and Perri (2010) explore the impacts of time varying macro risk, while several papers consider demographic heterogeneity as one reason for the emergence of external imbalances, such asHenriksen (2002),Cooper (2008), andDu and Wei (2
27、010).Other explanations for global imbalances include the anticipation of a rising U.S. future share in world output, trade channels, productivity growth in the non-traded sector, measurement error, the asset price boom of the late nineties (Laibson & Mollerstrom, 2010), etc.In other study,Lin (2013
28、)has reviewed the above explanations and argued that the deterioration of US trade deficits after the mid-1970s is caused primarily by the US households overconsumption as a result of the wealth effect from rising asset value due to financial deregulation and the expansionarymonetary policy, which i
29、n turn were made possible by the delink of US dollar to gold in 1971. Moreover, the only reason for the US to be able to sustain such a large and rising trade deficits for several decades is the status of US dollar as a major global reserve currency.In this paper we focus particularly on the USChina
30、 trade imbalances. Unlike the cases in which economic reasons are employed to explain US trade deficit with Japan and the oil exporting economies, China and other East Asian economies have been blamed, by some researchers and politicians, to manipulate the exchange rate to promote net exports and us
31、e this as the main components ofexport-led growthdevelopment strategy. In this paper, we will show that the US traditionally has a trade deficit with the East Asian economies due to the differences incomparative advantagesbetween the US and East Asian economies and the rising bilateral trade imbalan
32、ces between the US and China is a result of reallocation of production from Asias NIEs to China due to the evolution of comparative advantages over time. The US has trade imbalance with East Asian economies traditionally. While Chinas trade imbalance with US increased sharply after the 1990s, the share of USs trade imbalance with East Asian economies as a group declined in the same period. The facts suggest that the USs worsening of trade deficits in general and trade imbalance with China in specific are most likely to be a result of USs own internal reasons.3.Current status of USCh
