关税,简单来说,就是对进口商品征收的税。理解这一点至关重要,因为美国前总统特朗普在其任期内,将关税作为一项关键的经济政策工具,其影响波及全球。
经济学家Duncan Weldon指出,关税如同对外国商品征收的税,在商品进口时即被征收。历史上,重商主义盛行时期,各国普遍认为出口利国,进口则有害,因此采取高关税政策限制进口。然而,英国在19世纪至20世纪初,却奉行自由贸易,关税极低。二战后,发达国家普遍降低关税,直至近十年来出现转变。
关于关税的承担者,特朗普曾声称是征收关税的国家,但Weldon等经济学家认为,最终承担关税成本的是消费者。例如,对中国商品征收20%的关税,虽然部分成本可能由利润率下降或汇率波动吸收,但最终将导致美国消费者支付更高的价格。
全球化时代,贸易自由化程度提高,关税普遍下降,全球贸易持续增长,直到2008年金融危机。然而,自由贸易并非没有代价,它在国内也造成了赢家和输家。理想情况下,政府应通过机制将自由贸易的收益用于补偿受损行业和工人。但现实中,这种补偿机制往往缺失。
一个国家的经济规模对其关税政策的有效性至关重要。大型经济体如美国,由于其强大的国内生产能力和经济影响力,更能承受关税带来的冲击,甚至可以利用关税作为杠杆,影响其他国家的政策。而小型经济体则相对脆弱,容易受到关税战的负面影响。
面对来自中国的竞争,如果一个国家选择完全不征收关税,则可能面临产业被蚕食的风险。Weldon认为,理想状态下,全球不应存在关税,各国应从最有效的生产商处采购商品。然而,现实中存在市场扭曲,例如中国政府对某些产业的补贴和倾销行为,这使得一些国家不得不采取关税措施进行反制。但这又是一个充满风险的策略,因为界定“公平竞争”本身就存在挑战。
特朗普政府时期,关税成为其标志性政策之一。其动机包括:利用关税作为谈判筹码;绕过国会,直接实施关税政策;以及应对其认为的“其他国家占美国便宜”的贸易逆差。这种将世界最强大经济体描绘成贸易受害者的说法,虽然看似荒谬,却在美国社会中拥有广泛的支持,甚至跨越党派界限。
特朗普政府实施的关税措施包括:对太阳能电池板和洗衣机等商品征收全球性关税;对钢铁和铝征收高额关税;以及对中国商品征收大规模关税。这些措施引发了全球范围的贸易摩擦和反制措施,例如欧盟对美国商品征收关税,中国也采取了报复性措施。虽然特朗普政府期间与中国达成了贸易协议,部分关税有所下降,但关税政策的影响持续到拜登政府。
学术研究表明,特朗普政府的关税政策对美国消费者造成了负面影响,增加了商品价格。同时,依赖进口零部件的美国制造商也受到了冲击。尽管特朗普政府时期美国经济表现良好,但这并不意味着关税政策对美国经济产生了积极影响。相反,大量证据表明,关税政策对美国经济和全球经济都产生了负面影响,只是其负面影响在短期内并未完全显现。
总而言之,关税作为一种经济政策工具,其影响复杂且深远。虽然在特定情况下,关税可能被用作应对不公平贸易行为的手段,但其长期影响往往是负面的,可能导致通货膨胀上升,经济增长放缓,以及全球贸易摩擦加剧。 特朗普政府的关税政策,就是一个值得深入研究和反思的案例。
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Hi, David here. We're doing a new thing with the Briefing Room podcast, which is we're packaging up some bits you may have heard before on other programmes which are still very relevant, so they can explain specific things that are going on in the world. This week, tariffs. Donald Trump is in the White House, and he warned in his inaugural address that the US will tariff and tax foreign countries to enrich our citizens.
So let's find out exactly what a tariff is and how they've been used in the past. Here with me is Duncan Weldon, economist and author of 200 Years of Muddling Through.
Duncan Weldon, what is a tariff? I mean, the best way to think of a tariff is just to call it a tax. A tariff is essentially a tax imposed on foreign goods as opposed to domestic goods. And at what point is a tariff imposed? So a tariff is imposed at the time that a good is imported. I mean, say that we have domestically produced cars and foreign produced cars. The government could put a 20% tariff on foreign produced cars. So at the time that a foreign car was imported into Britain...
you know, there'd be a 20% tax on that. Now, let's just go through a brief history of tariffs. Have they always existed? Have they always been popular, unpopular? So if you go all the way back to sort of the early modern period, the 1600s, the 1700s, you know, governments at that time ran themselves generally with an economic system that has come to be called mercantilism. And mercantilism was a belief that
exports were good for your country and imports were bad. Because if your country was importing stuff, you were sending money, gold, to foreigners to pay for them. The idea was you want to keep imports out because imports aren't good for you.
If you talk about the history of it, Britain was for a long time what was called a free trade nation. Britain embraced free trade in the 19th century all the way into the 20th. Britain was a country which didn't really have tariffs, which was happy to have foreign goods flowing into Britain. Other countries took different approaches. Germany and the United States in the 19th century had a lot of protectionism.
The general sense, though, is after the Second World War, in the rich world, the developed economies, tariffs were generally low and falling until about a decade ago. Let's go back to the question of who actually pays the tariffs. You say it's a tax. You say it's levered at the point where the good comes in. But who actually pays for it?
Well, if you listen to Donald Trump, it's the country on which the tariffs have been imposed. Sadly for Donald Trump, economists would disagree. If you put a 20% tariff on Chinese imports into the United States, ultimately the costs of that are going to be paid by American consumers. Now, they probably won't pay 20% more. Some of it will be absorbed in the forms of lower profit margins. The currency of the country subject to tariffs might fall to offset tariffs.
some of it. But ultimately, it means higher prices for consumers. Now let's look again at the trends over time between free trade and tariffs. We've lived through the era that people call globalisation and I think it was a general presumption that globalisation meant the freest of free trade that you could get. I mean completely. We had falling tariff levels, rising global trade throughout the 1980s, the 1990s, all the way up to 2008.
more goods were imported, more people crossed borders, more capital crossed
cross borders. And yes, the general move was towards lower tariffs, more free trade. Now, economists were always clear that if you've got two countries engaging in trade that is mutually beneficial, both countries benefit from this trade. But economists aren't stupid. They could see there were winners and losers within countries from free trade. Now, what an economist would tell you is the number of winners in any country, the overall gains, outweighed the losses.
That doesn't mean there weren't losers. In an ideal world, some of those gains would have gone towards compensating the losers. What you mean is, if, say...
Ohio steel workers lost their jobs, but cheaper Chinese steel came in, then actually some other American industries would be benefiting from that. Overall, America is benefiting from this trade. But yes, there are losses among, say, Ohio steel workers. And yes, in an ideal world, your domestic political system would be able to take some of those gains from the winners and compensate the losers because there is more money than there would be otherwise. Now, that obviously didn't always happen.
Now overall, does the size or shape of your economy impact on whether free trade or tariffs are good or bad for you? The size of your economy does matter for a couple of reasons. Firstly, because if you're a continental-sized economy like the United States that can produce domestically an awful lot of different goods and services and have different bits of specialisation, you can probably be more self-sufficient than a small open economy like Britain or the Netherlands or France.
Secondly, because if you've got a lot of economic weight in the world, it is easier to throw that weight around. If a small country puts tariffs on a large country and the large tariff responds with its own tariffs, the small country is not going to win that economic fight. Now, what do you do if you're a country like the UK and you're facing competition in certain markets from China and you were just to say, we won't have any tariffs at all, we will just let it rip? Would we stand in danger of losing whole industries?
Economists would say, in a first best perfect world, there are no tariffs anywhere. We buy from the most efficient producers wherever they are in the world. Now, we don't live in a first best world.
There are distortions in the world. If you're looking at something like China, the argument becomes that, say Chinese steel in the last decade, that what European steel producers have faced is not free and fair market competition because the Chinese government has shoveled cheap loans and artificially subsidised and kept costs down for Chinese steel producers. They
They've produced too much steel and then, in the terminology, they're dumping that steel on foreign markets. Now, there is a case if you're facing dumping, you know, artificially cheap Chinese steel, to use tariffs to hold that out for a while. Now, I think that's fair in that case. The problem is, though, this is a very slippery slope. What counts as fair competition? What doesn't count as fair competition?
If you are a country who is on the receiving end of this dumping, you don't necessarily want your own bit of that industry devastated in the short run. If a country like, say, as big as the United States says, well, actually, we are going to deploy tariffs as a major element of policy, part of it for trade, maybe some of it for...
other reasons, will that country be able to get away with it without feeling the pain of it in the short, medium and long terms? So I think in the short run, if the United States was to move heavily towards tariffs, in the short run, we'd see an awful lot of economic pain in China, in parts of the European Union, in bits of Britain that export to the United States.
In America, in the very short run, you'd see a pick-up in inflation as prices rose because of these new taxes. We should call them taxes in this case, put on lots of goods. But in the short run, you might even see a boost in American output. But, and it's a big but, in the medium to the longer term,
What you're left with is higher inflation, more costly goods in America, and more importantly, less competition for American industry, less efficiency, less productivity, and slower growth in the long run. The general effect of moving towards this sort of protectionism will be maybe a short-term boost in employment and output, and that's a maybe, but almost certainly a long-term cost in terms of inflation and weaker productivity growth.
Duncan Weldon. Now let's find out what we know about Donald Trump and tariffs from the last time around. With me is Sam Lowe, partner at Flint Global, a financial consultancy. Sam Lowe, have tariffs always been an issue for Trump? Trump's love of tariffs stems from different assumptions.
One is that tariffs create leverage, so he can threaten a 10% tariff or 20% tariff on a country and they will give him something he wants to avoid those tariffs. The other reason I think he likes them in the context of being president is that he found he was able to apply them in some instances without having to go through the full democratic process, without having to involve Congress, without having the needing to be a vote.
And the third reason is that it seems he's become increasingly fixated on the idea that other countries are taking advantage of the US. By taking advantage, I mean they are persistently selling more to the US than they are buying. And he sees tariffs as a means of addressing that and rebalancing said trade. It does seem paradoxical that the richest and most powerful economy in the world sees itself as a victim of trade. And Trump's even annoyed with America's trade relationship with Canada today.
Does it make sense? It doesn't make sense from the outside. The idea that the richest country on earth is somehow being penalised by the system it largely created is seemingly absurd. But the point I'd make is that it's quite a commonly held view in the US and it straddles party line.
Many Democrats also believe that the current trading system as it's set up penalizes U.S. workers, that it's led to offshoring of jobs. It's led to the offshoring of heavy industry and manufacturing. It's led to the growth and development of China to the point that it's become a competitor. So while it does seem absurd, it's not an uncommon view in the United States.
Let's look back at the Trump first administration and be a bit more specific about what tariffs he brought in when he was in power for those four years. The first tranche of tariffs were related to solar panels and washing machine imports. So this was a he imposed a global tariff, a tariff on solar panels and washing machines imports.
from everywhere. And this did lead to some retaliation from China, for example, South Korea, bringing a WTO case. And this was in early 2018. World Trade Organization. World Trade Organization. And around the same time, he initiated new tariffs on steel and aluminium. So this is a 25% tariff on imported steel, 10% tariff on aluminium. And this is really what most people think of when they discuss trade wars in the context of the First
Trump administration because these tariffs triggered a reaction from everyone. The EU reacted by putting eventually tariffs on headline, well-known American companies such as Harley Davidson and also different whiskeys.
China also reacted. Trump had to negotiate with Canada and Mexico. It triggered quite a lot of global uncertainty and disruption. The third category, which people also talk about, is a lot of the China-specific tariffs. Trump eventually imposed tariffs on around $335 billion worth of US imports, and China retaliated as well. In the midst of this, people forget Trump actually negotiated a trade deal with China in this time, which saw some of the tariffs
fall away. But these tariffs did linger and continue into the Biden administration, where President Biden really did just continue on the same trend. Then other tariffs related and export controls related to semiconductors. There are also the discussion about applying tariffs to all automobile imports into the US on a national security basis, which is very confusing for those of us who don't consider cars a national security issue.
But those never materialized. He did threaten tariffs on Mexico in relation to illegal immigration across the border, although that was dealt with at the time via an agreement with the Mexican government. So he really does enjoy tariffs.
What can we say about that first administration, the impact the tariffs that were imposed actually had? In terms of the impact on the US consumer, all of the studies that have been done demonstrate that these tariffs came at a cost to the US consumer. But I suppose...
The point Trump would make is that the US economy fared very well during that time. So there's a question to how much that was really felt. The tariffs have also been shown to demonstrate that they negatively impacted those US manufacturers that used inputs from abroad. So import parts and then put them together in the US increased their costs. But again,
The Trump-1 economy was pretty buoyant. So the academic view and all the evidence suggests that these tariffs were negative for the US economy and also negative for the trade partners they were imposed on. But it's not necessarily viewed that way by the politicians involved.
Thanks very much for listening to today's Explainer. We'll be publishing these every week, a new mini-series. So make sure you follow The Briefing Room on BBC Sounds or wherever you get your podcasts so that you don't miss an episode when we publish them. And also remember you can go back and listen to any of our recent episodes on BBC Sounds. They're available now. Until the next time, goodbye.