‘Totally silly’: Trump’s focus on trade deficit bewilders economists
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The steep tariffs, most of which were paused by US President Donald Trump on April 9, were calculated based on bilateral trade deficits.
PHOTO: EPA-EFE
Ana Swanson
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WASHINGTON – Behind US President Donald Trump’s decision to hit some of America’s largest trading partners with stiff tariffs is his fixation on the trade deficit that the United States runs with other nations. But many economists say that is a poor metric for judging the quality of a trade relationship.
The steep tariffs, most of which were paused by Mr Trump on April 9
Mr Trump has long viewed that gap as evidence that America is being “ripped off” by other countries.
With his newest round of tariffs, the President declared the US trade deficit to be a national emergency, giving him the power to immediately impose tariffs.
But economists argue this is a flawed way to approach the issue, given that bilateral trade deficits crop up for many reasons beyond unfair practices.
“It’s totally silly,” Professor Dani Rodrik, an economist who studies globalisation at Harvard University, said of Mr Trump’s focus on bilateral deficits. “There’s no other way to say it, it makes no sense.”
Some economists do agree with the Trump administration that America’s overall trade deficit with the rest of the world reflects a problem for the US economy, because the US is so dependent on manufacturing elsewhere, including in China.
The US trade deficit hit a record US$1.2 trillion (S$1.6 trillion) in 2024, as imports surged. But others do not see it as an issue. And nearly all economists say that focusing on imbalances from country to country can be highly misleading.
In 2024, for example, the US ran bilateral trade surpluses with 116 countries globally. It ran bilateral trade deficits with 114 countries, according to World Bank data.
Often these relationships just follow the flow of trade, without suggesting much about a country’s trade practices overall.
Mr Matthew Klein, who writes about economics for The Overshoot, points out that the US runs a trade surplus with Australia because it sends out lots of machinery, transportation equipment and chemicals.
Australia runs a trade surplus with China, sending it iron ore, natural gas and gold. And China runs a trade surplus with the US by sending it car parts, electronics and batteries.
The US also has substantial trade surpluses with the Netherlands and Singapore, Mr Klein pointed out. But that is not because Dutch and Singaporean people consume so many more American products than other nations.
It is because those countries are home to major ports that import American goods. The Netherlands unloads US goods in its ports and sends them throughout Europe to other consumers, while Singapore does something similar for Asia.
But the trade balance is calculated based on the country the goods reach first, not their ultimate destination.
Economists have also criticised Mr Trump’s tariffs for targeting all foreign trade
Mr Trump’s tariffs are calculated by a simple formula, which boils down to dividing the trade deficit the US runs with each country by the value of goods the US imports from it.
That formula means that, until US imports from and exports to every country balance out, other countries will face additional tariffs, whether the nation provides the US with advanced technology, toys, cocoa beans or corn.
Mr Trump’s advisers have defended his methodology. Dr Stephen Miran, the chair of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, said in an interview that the President had been “clear for decades that he thinks that bilateral trade deficits are a major problem for Americans”.
Mr Miran argued that the trade deficit could be a “proxy for the totality of economic policies that cause persistent trade deficits”.
The Trump administration did a lot of analysis of the situation, he said, and the President decided that the approach “was the fairest course for American workers”.
In testimony before Congress on April 9, Mr Jamieson Greer, the US trade representative, pointed to discriminatory policies in places such as the European Union, Brazil and India that had resulted in growing trade deficits.
He said the US trade deficit was “driven by these non-reciprocal conditions” and called it “a manifestation of the loss of the nation’s ability to make, to grow and to build”.
“It’s dangerous, and the president recognises the urgency of the moment,” Mr Greer said.
The administration also seems to view the focus on bilateral trade deficits as a way to get at the fact that goods from China appear to have been routed through other countries and on to the US.
After Mr Trump imposed tariffs on China in his first term, many factories moved outside China to avoid the tariffs, but continued to rely on Chinese parts, raw materials and technology.
With Mr Trump’s new tariff formula, countries that have been the destination for these factories and have had their trade surpluses with the US balloon in recent years will be hit hard.
“Because the global economy is now so integrated, countries have been able to move goods through third counties to get into our market,” said Mr Mark DiPlacido, a policy adviser at American Compass, a conservative economic think-tank.
As the US bilateral trade deficit with China has decreased, the deficit with other South-east Asian countries has increased, he said.
“So it’s not enough to just target China anymore,” he said. “There just needs to be this global baseline if we’re going to see the overall trade deficit decrease.”
Professor of finance Michael Pettis from Peking University in Beijing, who studies the topic, said the new tariffs might reroute the way trade moves through certain countries, but still not do much to change the size of the overall trade deficit the US runs with the world.
“They’re focusing on the wrong problem, bilateral deficits,” Prof Pettis said.
Prof Pettis sees the overall trade deficit that the US runs with the world as a problem for the American economy because it means that US consumer demand for goods supports manufacturing activity elsewhere, like in China, rather than in the US.
But he insists that the trade imbalances the US has individually with other countries are not always reflective of that problem, and that tariffs would not necessarily do much to fix it.
In his view, government policies in places such as China, Germany, South Korea and Taiwan are driving major trade surpluses. Because every trade surplus needs a deficit to balance it, that ends up inflating the US trade deficit.
Without bigger economic changes in China and other countries, these problems will still persist, he argues.
“There is a serious problem,” he said. “We’re not seeing the best solution to that problem.”
Other economists still dispute the idea that running an overall trade deficit with the rest of the world is an issue for the US. Other factors, like US government spending and investment flows, are the ultimate driver of the US trade deficit, not demand for goods, some economists argue.
And they say that, if Mr Trump’s tariffs do reduce the overall trade deficit, it will more likely be because they tanked the US economy or drove investors away from the US by sapping the world’s confidence in the US dollar and its markets.
Prof Rodrik, the Harvard economist, said there was “absolutely no relationship between a country’s trade deficit and how well it’s doing”.
He pointed out that both Venezuela and Russia run trade surpluses.
“Does the United States really want to be a Venezuela or a Russia?” NYTIMES
