IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/p/amu/wpaper/2022-02.html
   My bibliography  Save this paper

Costs of Trade Wars: The Distributional Consequence of US Section 301 Tariffs Against China

Author

Listed:
  • Kara Reynolds

Abstract

Between 2018 and 2020, the United States imposed massive new tariffs under a variety of trade laws, most notably the Section 301 tariffs against China. This new protection is extensive in magnitude and breadth; tariffs range from 10 to 30 percent and cover 50 percent of US consumer imports from China and 16 percent of total US consumer imports. Using data from the Consumer Expenditure Survey, I find that the new taxes are highly regressive; the lowest income consumers pay more than 1.2 percent of their after-tax income to fight these trade wars, while the wealthiest consumers pay just 0.18 percent of their after-tax income. I find additional evidence that women and parents are paying an unfair share of efforts to put America first.

Suggested Citation

  • Kara Reynolds, 2022. "Costs of Trade Wars: The Distributional Consequence of US Section 301 Tariffs Against China," Working Papers 2022-02, American University, Department of Economics.
    • Handle: RePEc:amu:wpaper:2022-02
    DOI: 10.2139/ssrn.3862764
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    File URL: https://dx.doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3862764
    File Function: First version, 2022
    Download Restriction: no
    File URL: https://libkey.io/10.2139/ssrn.3862764?utm_source=ideas
    LibKey link: if access is restricted and if your library uses this service, LibKey will redirect you to where you can use your library subscription to access this item
    ---><---

    More about this item

    Keywords

    Tariffs; Section 301; Consumer Loss;
    All these keywords.

    JEL classification:

    • F13 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Trade Policy; International Trade Organizations
    • F61 - International Economics - - Economic Impacts of Globalization - - - Microeconomic Impacts
    • F14 - International Economics - - Trade - - - Empirical Studies of Trade

    NEP fields

    This paper has been announced in the following NEP Reports:

    Statistics

    Access and download statistics

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:amu:wpaper:2022-02. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Thomas Meal (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.american.edu/cas/economics/ .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.