(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Will Trump Take Ford’s New China Trade Hint?

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(What's Left of) Our Economy Trump, automotive, border adjustment tax, China, Ford Motor Company, imports, Jobs, manufacturing, Mexico, NAFTA, North American Free Trade Agreement, offshoring, tariffs, trade agreements, trade balances, Trade Deficits

President Trump and his administration have certainly been active on the trade front in their first months in office, both in word and deed. The question remains whether they’ve been effective, and a breaking news story has just added powerfully to the doubters’ case.

The news has to do with Ford Motor Company’s announcement that it will scrap plans to relocate its remaining small car production from the United States to Mexico and supply the American market from an existing plant in Hermosillo, and instead import the vehicles from a retooled factory in China. The initial Ford production decision came under fire from Mr. Trump, and the company’s reaction – a rejiggered Mexico plan – looked chancy for two main reasons:

First, the president had declared his intention to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) in large measure to stop such production offshoring. Second, the staunchly pro-trade Republican leaders of the GOP-controlled House of Representatives had been pushing a border adjustment tax proposal that would have imposed new costs on imports from anywhere.

Ford has now underscored why both opponents and supporters of a transformed, less import-friendly U.S. trade policy have been right in one of their major criticisms of Mr. Trump’s emerging strategy: A tight focus on bilateral trade issues and balances overlooks the ability of multinational companies to shift export-oriented production in order to evade country-specific tariffs or other trade curbs.

Not that business’ ability to hopscotch is unlimited. The massive level of sunk corporate costs in export-focused production in China, for example, won’t always be easy to walk away from. And not all countries offer comparable advantages to manufacturers. So given, for example, that China accounts for more than 43 percent of the American merchandise trade deficit, or that Mexico’s geography makes it such an unusually attractive base for selling to U.S. customers, focusing on individual-country or regional priorities often makes good sense.

It’s also legitimate in principle to base trade preferences on non-economic aims, like national security (e.g., rewarding allies or strengthening third world economies against the appeal of terrorism) – though Mr. Trump has expressed strong skepticism for this approach, notably in his Inaugural Address. And of course, prioritization is often the key to any successful public policy.

But what’s especially strange about the Trump trade strategy so far is the president’s indifference – at best – to the border adjustment tax idea. On top of undercutting corporate tariff arbitrage strategies by levying a tax on all imports (and encouraging exports), the measure would also bring in revenue needed to finance crucial domestic needs like infrastructure and healthcare reform without completely busting the federal budget. And its passage would by no means preclude addressing special trade priorities of all kinds with additional restrictions.

Ford’s new production announcement is just the latest in a series of comments from Corporate America that bear out one of President Trump’s central insights: that trade policy changes can decisively influence corporate sourcing decisions to America’s benefit. Now, however, he needs to recognize that his essential goal of using trade restrictions to lure valuable manufacturing production and jobs back to the United States requires policies with global scope. The half- (at best) measures he’s favored so far are just too easily gamed.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Why Ag Fears Mustn’t Drive Trump’s NAFTA Revamp

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agriculture, automotive, exports, imports, Jacob Bunge, manufacturing, Mexico, NAFTA, North American Free Trade Agreement, offshoring, The Wall Street Journal, Trade, Trade Deficits, Trump, {What's Left of) Our Economy

You have to hand it to the American agriculture industry: It has great lobbyists and public relations flacks. Just look at the job they’ve done convincing the Trump administration to pay special attention to the farm sector’s concerns when renegotiating the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) with Mexico and Canada. And as made clear by The Wall Street Journal today, they’re keeping the pressure on in an effort to convince the president that the United States doesn’t hold such overwhelming leverage in these talks with Mexico in particular.

No one can blame ag from doing its job. But maybe the press could do a somewhat better job of providing valuable context, as the Journal article today simply didn’t?

It’s indeed noteworthy, as The Journal‘s Jacob Bunge reported, that American farm exports to Mexico have fallen so far this year, especially given that Mexico is the third largest foreign market for these goods. Moreover, it does look like the drop stems at least partly from Mexico’s search for alternatives to U.S. suppliers in order to create NAFTA revamp bargaining chips.

But a broader examination of bilateral trade flows shows that, however important, agriculture doesn’t deserve pride of place in America’s trade negotiations – with Mexico or any other countries. First of all, according to the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis, last year, agriculture (along with forestry, fishing, and hunting) comprised 0.9 percent of the American economy on a value-added basis. Manufacturing represented 11.7 percent.

Last year, moreover, manufactures exports (of $1.05127 trillion) topped agricultural exports ($134.88 billion) by a factor of nearly eight. It’s true that agriculture ran a trade surplus and manufacturing an immense deficit. But the former – about $20 billion – was hardly an economic game-changer, and that was especially so considering the nearly $862 billion scale of the latter.

U.S.-Mexico trade tells a similar story: According to The Journal, 2016 saw America sell $18 billion worth of agricultural products to Mexico. Manufacturing exports were about eight times as great: just over $143 billion.

But there are some big problems with these manufacturing exports. For example, they’re much more than offset by U.S. manufactures imports from Mexico. In fact, since 2009 (the year the current recovery began), this bilateral trade deficit has risen more than twice as fast (by 125 percent) than that with China (52.56 percent).

Moreover, Trump is right about much of this imbalance resulting from NAFTA-induced American production offshoring to Mexico that aims to sell back into the United States. That’s had much to do with the 1990-2013 drop in the United States’ share of North American light vehicle production from 78 to 64 percent, and the rise in Mexico’s share from six to 19 percent. That’s also had much to do with the more than tripling of the U.S. bilateral trade deficit in autos and light trucks since NAFTA’s signing.

In fact, in the first eleven months of 2016, Mexico exported nearly 80 percent of the 3.22 million autos it produced, and fully 77 percent of them were sent north of the border.

As a result, auto industry leaders have plainly stated that without the unfettered access NAFTA provides to the American market, and without the incentives to produce in super-cheap and largely unregulated Mexico created by the treaty, most of their auto investment in Mexico would lose its raison d’etre.

No one is calling for neglecting America’s farm sector during the NAFTA renegotiation. But the outsized role played by manufacturing, and manufacturing trade deficits in regional trade, along with manufacturing’s historic role as the United States’ productivity growth and innovation leader, couldn’t make clearer that letting ag export fears dominate this economic diplomacy would be a classic case of letting the tail wag the dog.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Which Democrats are Serious and Un-Serious About Trade Overhaul?

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AFL-CIO, Bernie Sanders, Canada, Charles Schumer, currency manipulation, Debbie Dingell, Democrats, dispute resolution, Elizabeth Warren, environmental standards, labor standards, Mexico, NAFTA, North American Free Trade Agreement, Politico, Richard Neal, Robert Lighthizer, Rosa deLauro, rules of origin, Thea Lee, Trade, Trump, U.S. Trade Representative, unions, Wilbur Ross, William Pascrell, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Usually, paying attention to instances of politicians and other public figures getting up on their soapboxes is a waste of time. Yesterday served up an exception: a press conference held by House Democrats in reaction to President Trump’s official decision to open talks to renegotiate the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). The statements recorded in this Politico account offer some evidence as to which leaders on America’s Left are willing to work with the administration on trade policies that can help the working class voters Democrats still profess to champion, and those who will remain content to sit on the sidelines and take partisan potshots.

Reportedly, all of the House members who spoke at the event “said…they feared Trump would make only modest changes to NAFTA after blasting it as an economic disaster throughout last year’s presidential campaign.” The basis for these worries? The letter sent yesterday by new U.S. Trade Representative Robert Lighthizer to Congressional leaders announcing the administration’s intention to open NAFTA talks with the two other signatories, Canada and Mexico. According to these House Democrats and some other trade critics, the document apparently was “short on details,” which many claimed indicated Trump’s intention simply to “tweak” rather than comprehensively overhaul the agreement.

All else equal, wondering about the president’s real intentions is anything but unreasonable. His personality, after all, is mercurial, and one of his major trade initiatives to date – the negotiations begun with Beijing following February’s summit with Chinese leader XiJinping – has legitimately disappointed advocates of the major course change he pledged during the campaign. (The other major trade initiative, scrapping the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade agreement, kept a leading campaign promise to the letter.) Moreover, the Lighthizer letter is indeed short on specifics.

But none of the participants in the press conference seems to have noticed that in previous statements –including reportedly to leading Democratic lawmakers, top Trump officials have emphasized the need for dramatic NAFTA changes.

For example, Commerce Secretary Wilbur Ross has described as high NAFTA-related priorities greatly tightening the pact’s rules of origin in order to incentivize more non-NAFTA manufacturing investment inside the free trade zone, and restructuring a dispute-resolution system that gives each signatory an equal vote even though the United States represents more than 85 percent of North America’s total economic output. Reinforcing this point was the Lighthizer letter’s contention that “establishing effective implementation and aggressive enforcement of the commitments made by our trading partners under our trade agreements is vital to the success of these agreements and should be improved in the context of NAFTA.”

Meanwhile, Lighthizer reportedly has told Senators that the administration is thinking of adding to NAFTA rules that would prohibit currency manipulation – a move that would set a valuable precedent for future trade deals. In addition, his letter mentioned the need to improve NAFTA’s labor and environmental protections. In my view, they’re largely unenforceable. But they’ve been a prime focus of Democratic Party trade policy positions for decades.

So given that background, it seems fair at this point to finger Connecticut’s Rosa deLauro, New Jersey’s Bill Pascrell, and Massachusetts’ Richard Neal as grandstanders. The former stressed the “tweaking” allegation. The latter two charged that “It was clear from the start that the administration was only interested in working with the Congressional Republican leadership in drafting this notice [the Lighthizer letter].”

I’d also include in this group several key Senate Democrats, including Leader Charles Schumer of New York, former presidential candidate Bernie Sanders of New York, and Elizabeth Warren of Massachusetts. They voted against Lighthizer’s confirmation despite his decades-long record of fighting predatory foreign trade practices both as Deputy U.S. Trade Representative during the Reagan administration, and as a trade lawyer representing domestic American producers.

More temperate in their judgments were Michigan’s Debbie Dingell, and the AFL-CIO’s Thea Lee. The former stated that she was “investing the time to understand where the consensus is.” The latter said, “We enter every negotiation in a good faith state of mind and we expect a lot from our government. Certainly candidate Trump made a lot of promises about fixing flawed trade agreements and looking out for American workers and good jobs, so we will hold him and his administration to that promise.”

I can’t think of a more reasonable position for politicians and other supporters of a movement that still styles itself as the “party of the common man [and woman].”

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Slight March Trade Deficit Dip Conceals Numerous Milestones, Major Asia Deterioration

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Asia, Canada, Census Bureau, China, European Union, exports, free trade agreements, high tech goods, imports, Japan, KORUS, manufacturing, Mexico, NAFTA, North American Free Trade Agreement, Pacific Rim, recovery, services, South Korea, Trade, trade deficit, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Note:  So many new records and multi-year highs were revealed by the March trade figures released this morning by the Census Bureau that I’m posting this abbreviated, just calculated, write-up — containing all the main highlights — rather than the usual lengthier, more comprehensive version.

America’s goods and services trade deficit slipped by 0.12 percent on month in March, to $43.71 billion, but the decline was more than offset by a noteworthy 0.47 percent upward revision to the originally reported February figure – to $43.76 billion. This modest movement, moreover, masked major deterioration in America’s trade balances with Pacific Rim countries, many of whose surpluses with the United States had been depressed by winter or spring holidays. 

Whereas in February, the American goods deficit with that region plunged sequentially by 30.76 percent, it rebounded in March by 25.39 percent, to $33.55 billion – the biggest such jump since last March 2015’s 52.63 percent. The greatest (15.53 percent) monthly merchandise import increase since then was largely responsible. Although the China goods deficit remained high – mainly because U.S. merchandise exports in March fell for the fifth straight month – the biggest trade swings were recorded with Japan and South Korea. Significantly, March marked the fifth anniversary of the implementation of the bilateral U.S.-Korea free trade agreement (KORUS) 

The March merchandise deficit with Japan soared by nearly 55 percent, to its highest level ($7.42 billion) since April, 2008 ($7.61 billion). And American goods imports from Japan rose by 32.12 percent to $13.04 billion – their highest total since March, 2007 ($13.47 billion). 

U.S. merchandise exports to South Korea hit a new monthly all-time high in March ($4.36 billion), imports rose to their second highest level ever ($6.61 billion), and the large sequential gains left the goods deficit at $2.25 billion. That was 73.50 percent higher than a February figure that itself had fallen by nearly 50 percent.  

Since KORUS’ implementation, in March, 2012, the U.S. merchandise deficit with South Korea has more than quadrupled (from $561.4 million) on a monthly basis.  By that same measure, U.S. goods exports to South Korea are up by 3.99 percent, and goods imports are 38.08 percent higher. 

The huge and chronic U.S. goods deficit with China rose by 7.03 percent sequentially in March, to $24.58 billion, but remained well below record levels. Nonetheless, American merchandise exports to China’s still strongly growing economy fell for the fifth straight month, to $9.63 billion. That was their lowest level since last September ($9.56 billion). 

Asia events also clearly influenced the big on month rebounds in the March trade deficits for manufacturing (up 15.23 percent, to $69.76 billion, after dropping by 19.88 percent) and high tech goods (up 33.87 percent, to $6.07 billion, after plummeting by 46.39 percent).

New records and multi-year highs were set in U.S. trade on other fronts, too. American goods exports to the European Union hit $25.69 billion – a new all-time best. Goods imports from NAFTA partner, Mexico, however, hit a new record as well ($21.02 billion), and helped boost the bilateral merchandise to its highest level ($7.03 billion) since November, 2007 ($7.23 billion) – just before the Great Recession officially began. The United States fared better with its other NAFTA partner, Canada. Its merchandise deficit sank by 35.49 percent, to $1.37 billion, as exports of $24.92 billion represented the best such total since March, 2015 ($25.50 billion), and imports of $26.29 billion represented their highest level since June, 2015 ($27.34 billion).

U.S. global services exports rose in March to a new record high as well ($64.70 billion), and helped push the surplus to its best level ($21.80 billion) since June, 2015 ($22.41 billion). As for overall goods and services exports and imports, they both fell sequentially in March (by 1.02 percent and 0.73 percent, respectively). 

The trade drag on the historically feeble American economic recovery declined as well, from 17.55 percent in the fourth quarter of last year to 17.44 percent of during the first quarter of this year, but still slowed the economy’s cumulative expansion by a staggering $433.76 billion after inflation.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Laughable NAFTA Defenses from the New York Fed

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Canada, competitiveness, Federal Reserve, intermediate goods, intra-industry trade, Mexico, NAFTA, New York Fed, North America, North American Free Trade Agreement, rules of origin, supply chains, tariffs, The Race to the Bottom, Trade, Trump, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Although the Federal Reserve Bank of New York says that posts on its Liberty Street Economics blog “do not necessarily reflect the position” of either this branch of the federal reserve system or the system itself, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that the bank has gone to war against President Trump’s announced plans to renegotiate NAFTA (the North American Free Trade Agreement). Why else would it have run items critical of these plans on consecutive days last week?

Even more important, it’s hard to avoid the conclusion that these posts aren’t vetted seriously for basic knowledge of America’s international trade situation, or even common sense. Key examples from each of these posts should suffice to establish the New York Fed’s combination of bias and ineptitude here.

The first post, by a New York Fed official and an economist from the offshoring interests-funded Institute for International Economics, purported to show that “An underappreciated benefit of … (NAFTA) is the protection it offers U.S. exporters from extreme tariff uncertainty in Mexico….Without NAFTA, there is a risk that tariffs on U.S. exports to Mexico could reach their bound rates, which average 35 percent. In contrast, U.S. bound rates average only 4 percent. At the very least, U.S. exporters would be subject to a higher level of policy uncertainty without the trade agreement.”

But it quickly becomes clear that even the authors are skeptical about this outcome. Their main stated reason hints at one main reason: “”Given the large and well-documented benefits from low trade barriers, particularly those stemming from access to a wider variety of imported intermediate inputs and lower prices of intermediate inputs, it would not be in Mexico’s interest to raise all of its MFN tariffs to their bound rates.”

This argument is only a hint, however, because it jaw-droppingly softpedals some of the main characteristics of U.S.-Mexico trade – specifically, the hugely outsized role played in this commerce by intra-industry trade. As I first described at length in The Race to the Bottom, a large share of U.S.-Mexico trade has little to do with the exchange of finished goods that dominates the textbook models. Instead, it consists of parts and components and other inputs of finished goods that travel through international production chains until they’re turned into final products.

And because there’s so little consumer purchasing power in Mexico, and so much in the United States, the lion’s share of this bilateral intra-industry trade in turn consists of intermediates being sent from U.S. factories to Mexican facilities, where they’re assembled into final products for export back to America.

Sure, in principle, a U.S. scrapping of NAFTA (which of course is not the Trump administration’s stated intention) could enable Mexico to substitute non-U.S. parts and components etc for the American-made intermediates that current make up so many of its exports. But without NAFTA, Mexico would also lose much and probably most of its current, unconditional access to the U.S. market. And since that market currently buys nearly 80 percent of Mexico’s exports, and since Mexico’s economy relies so heavily on those exports, it should quickly becomes obvious how self-defeating such a Mexican effort at hardball playing would be.

How bizarre that neither the article’s authors, nor anyone else involved in producing Liberty Street Economics, recognized these longstanding realities. Even weirder: The importance of this intra-industry trade in U.S.-Mexico trade was the major theme of another post from the same authors (plus a third) on this same blog that appeared the very next day.

Yet the NAFTA-related follies of the authors and of Liberty Street Economics hardly end there. In that second post, readers are warned that stricter rules of origin (ROO) for NAFTA could “disrupt supply chains” and in particular backfire on U.S.-based businesses by increasing the costs of their imported inputs and undermining the competitiveness of their exports outside North America.

To which someone who actually knows something current U.S. NAFTA renegotiating plans can only reply, “Seriously?”

For what the authors and the rest of the Liberty Street crowd seem to miss is that the only ROO revamping that would make any sense from a U.S. standpoint is also precisely the kind of revamping that the Trump administration seems to be considering: not only tightening the ROO (to confine duty-free treatment for goods traded inside the NAFTA zone to goods with higher levels of content produced inside the zone), but increasing the tariff penalties imposed on goods with relatively low levels of non-North American content.

In other words, the North American supply chains created by NAFTA wouldn’t be weakened. They’d be strengthened and greatly expanded.

Now the authors could still be right in arguing that such measures would raise the prices of goods made inside North America and thereby undermine their competitiveness outside North America. But they completely neglect two counter-arguments.

First, because the (U.S.-dominated) North American market is already so vast, and because intermediate goods industries in the three NAFTA countries are already so enormous, external tariffs that encourage North American businesses to use even more North American content could well bring gains inside the NAFTA zone that exceed whatever non-NAFTA losses are incurred.

Second, NAFTA as it currently exists was touted as a major boost to U.S. and North American global competitiveness, but there’s no evidence that this goal was achieved. Quite the contrary, at least according to World Trade Organization data.

They show that in 1993, the year before NAFTA went into effect, North America’s share of global goods exports was 17.9 percent. By 2015, it had shrunk to 14.4 percent. The U.S. share during this period fell from 12.6 percent to 9.4 percent, and the Canadian share decreased even faster – from 3.9 percent to 2.6 percent (no doubt, however, largely due to falling prices for the oil it exports so abundantly).

Mexico’s share of global exports did increase – from 1.4 percent to 2.4 percent. But surely that improvement stemmed mainly from selling to the United States, not to any non-North American customers.

The North American share of world merchandise imports did decrease during this period as well. But the decline was much smaller, and one quick look at the U.S. trend makes clear that the lion’s share of this improvement has resulted from the recent, dramatic turnaround in American energy trade patterns – which have nothing to do with NAFTA or any other supply chains.

The Federal Reserve system, and especially its crucially important New York branch, have long been renowned for employing premier economists and sponsoring first-rate economic analysis. But these Liberty Street Economics posts indicate that, at least when it comes to NAFTA, the New York Fed is better described as the Gang that Can’t Shoot Straight.

Following Up: Why Buy American Reform is More Urgent – & Feasible – Than Ever

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Buy American, Following Up, free trade agreements, GAO, Government Accountability Office, Government Procurement Agreement, GPA, NAFTA, North American Free Trade Agreement, Obama, The Wall Street Journal, Trade, World Trade Organization, WTO

Although it doubtless wasn’t an intention of Wall Street Journal reporters Coulter Jones and Shane Shifflett, their article this morning on President Trump’s recent efforts to strengthen the U.S. government’s Buy America regulations considerably bolstered the case that overhaul is indeed vital – and within reach politically.

As I reported last month, a February Government Accountability Office (GAO) study showed that the United States is getting completely fleeced by its adherence to provisions in various bilateral or regional trade deals (like the North American Free Trade Agreement), along with a worldwide plurilateral agreement, that aim at eliminating domestic preference programs like Buy American regs.

The two main problems, according to the GAO? First, the best available data reveals that the United States has opened up its government purchases to foreign competition much wider than the nearly 50 other signatories of the Government Procurement Agreement (GPA) sponsored by the World Trade Organization (WTO). Second, Washington’s implementation of this arrangement and of similar provisions in other trade deals has been so negligent that the U.S. government never bothered even to find out how well the GPA, or any of the similar agreements, was working until two Democratic Senators commissioned the GAO study – more than twenty years after the global agreement was signed.

Journal correspondents Jones and Shifflett spent most of their article purporting to explain that any administration efforts to boost Washington’s purchases of U.S.-origin goods and services would amount to “swimming against the tide.” After all, as they documented, “For the current fiscal year beginning in October, foreign businesses have received a bigger share of federal contract dollars than in any other year since at least 2009.” In fact, “foreign-owned companies already hauled in more money from federal contracts in the past three months [i.e, during the Trump presidency] than in any corresponding period in a decade.”

Moreover, any changes to procurement policy made by President Trump “would likely face legal challenges….Additionally, any executive order Mr. Trump may issue requiring the government to buy exclusively American-made products has the potential to be challenged in court, or overturned by Congress or a future administration” – because of trade treaties that aimed “to make it easier for U.S. companies to compete overseas by mutually easing trade restrictions with other countries.”

But the recent rise in federal contracts for foreign-made goods, according to the article, has nothing to do with either Trump administration negligence or uncontrollable forces. As the authors point out, “Much of the payout to foreign-owned firms in the first quarter of this calendar year was set in motion by the Obama administration.” Of course, that was the same Obama administration that came into office in 2009 and oversaw that previously noted longer-term surge in contracts awarded to foreign goods and services providers.

Further, those trade treaties described by the Journal piece as such towering obstacles to a Buy American overhaul are the same trade treaties that the GAO has strongly indicated are utter failures.

The administration knows about the unacceptable record of these arrangements, as do the Democratic Senators who requested the GAO study. How difficult, then, would it really be for the president to muster bipartisan Congressional support for declaring these deals null and void – at least pending convincing evidence that they’re working after all? And given the pervasive discrimination U.S.-based goods and service providers clearly face in most foreign government markets, how difficult would it be for Mr. Trump to win similar legislative backing for narrowing the loopholes and waivers contained in the current Buy American regulations – and monitoring and enforcing tighter rules much more effectively?

In other words, how many American lawmakers would insist on continuing to obey broken treaties and on refusing to re-level the procurement playing field unilaterally for domestic businesses and their employers? The answers may not be obvious to Mainstream Media journalists. They’re surely more obvious to politicians accountable to American voters.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Another Pro-NAFTA Auto Trade Myth Bites the Dust

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automotive, domestic content, light trucks, Mexico, NAFTA, North American Free Trade Agreement, offshoring, passenger cars, rules of origin, sport-utility vehicles, SUVs, The Wall Street Journal, Trade, Trump, WardsAuto.com, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Ever since presidential candidate Donald Trump began slamming big U.S.- and foreign-owned automakers for moving production and jobs from America to Mexico due to the incentives created by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), his critics have portrayed these attacks as a quintessential example of his ignorance about the automotive industry. How interesting, then, to report that brand new industry figures go far toward explaining why the new president’s concerns have been justified all along.

Mr. Trump, they insisted, either didn’t know or didn’t want to know that this offshoring – typified by this Ford announcement last September – stemmed not mainly from NAFTA’s terms but from the simple economics of different segments of the auto market. Even better, American domestic auto production was sure to benefit and indeed was already benefiting.

Why? Because nearly all of the auto capacity and employment moving to Mexico had to do with passenger cars, whose relatively small size and sluggish sales (due to low-ish oil prices) reduced their margins and made them uneconomical to manufacture in the United States with its high labor costs. So the automakers had wisely decided that their future production should be in much lower cost Mexico. Yet those moves would leave plenty of work for the companies’ remaining U.S. factories and employees, which would focus ever more tightly on more appealing and therefore higher margin sport-utility vehicles (SUVs) and light trucks.

To be sure, such claims had already been powerfully undercut by data showing that within North America, Mexico’s overall share of vehicle production had long been rising at the expense of the United States’. And the period of time examined includes SUV/light trucks boom years. But new statistics indicate that the SUV claims themselves are increasingly bogus as well.

Specifically, The Wall Street Journal has just presented data from the authoritative WardsAuto.com revealing not only that Mexico’s share of the NAFTA zone’s total light vehicle output (passenger cars, SUVs, and light trucks combined) just topped 20 percent for the first time. According to the Journal account, this milestone was reached largely because “the amount of popular pickups and SUVs made south of the border sharply increased.”

In addition, the Journal article indicates that these trends will only continue. For although Fiat Chrysler and Volkswagen in particular “are boosting jobs and investments at American plants amid a focus on building more trucks…those plans are unlikely to lighten the companies’ dependence on Mexican factories for U.S. sales.”

None of this should be the slightest bit surprising. Claims that Mexico was mainly being used by automakers to manufacture passenger cars of course are consistent with the notion spread for years by globalization cheerleaders that production and jobs offshored to developing countries were mainly the low end of various industries, and would permit higher paid and more productive workers in the United States to concentrate on where their efforts more properly belonged – the much more higher value and promising “good stuff.”

But this contention never made any sense. If workers in Mexico – or China or India or Brazil – could be trained to produce small cars etc efficiently, why on earth would larger vehicles remain beyond their reach – at least for very long?

So President Trump’s plans to revamp NAFTA to eliminate its offshoring bias make perfect sense from the standpoint of the domestic U.S. economy. Further, proposals being considered to ensure that all products sold in North America without tariffs be overwhelmingly North American made make just as much sense for all three signatories – since they would boost production and employment throughout the free trade zone. And these measures would even be good ultimately for the vehicle-makers themselves – unless they think that using Americans as customers in their business models but not nearly so much as workers will make any sense for much longer.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Where America Has Literally Been Asleep at the Switch on Trade

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Buy American, Canada, Commerce Department, European Union, free trade agreements, FTAs, government procurement, Government Procurement Agreement, GPA, Japan, Jeff Merkley, NAFTA, North American Free Trade Agreement, Norway, Politico, South Korea, Tammy Baldwin, Trade, Trump, Wilbur Ross, World Trade Organization, WTO, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Here’s a big, sincere shout-out to U.S. Senators Jeff Merkley (Oregon) and Tammy Baldwin (Illinois). Thanks to their insightful curiosity, Americans have just gotten evidence that their country’s trade policy is indeed as much of a disaster area as claimed by President Trump and other critics.

Their accomplishment? The two Democrats asked the Government Accountability Office (GAO) to look into how well Washington has been implementing a more than two-decade-old global trade agreement aimed at opening government procurement markets around the world. Also examined: the trade liberalization record of government procurement provisions of bilateral and regional trade agreements signed by the United States (like the North American Free Trade Agreement, or NAFTA).

The findings were released last month (and alertly reported by Politico‘s trade correspondents), and make clear that the United States has been getting royally shafted. Moreover, these results have been inevitable both because the global deal was so poorly conceived from an American standpoint, and because literally no one in the U.S. trade policy-making apparatus has been tracking the results of either the global agreement or the relevant sections of the narrower trade deals agreement affecting literally trillions of dollars worth of actual and potential sales.

Even worse, the blithe assumption that other signatory countries has been scrupulously abiding by all of these procurement agreements has sharply limited America’s willingness to expand and tighten the Buy American rules that cover its own official purchases – in the process, passing up major opportunities for growth and job creation at a time of economic weakness. And P.S. This includes President Trump.

The GPA is a “plurilateral” agreement negotiated under the auspices of the World Trade Organization. In other words, accession by WTO members is voluntary. Still, the deal, which went into effect in 1996, currently encompasses 47 countries that are now committed to placing foreign enterprises and their own domestic entities on an equal footing when they compete for government contracts. Nine other WTO members are in the process of signing on. Most of America’s bilateral and regional trade agreements also prohibit discrimination in awarding these opportunities for supplying governments with goods and services. Consequently, 19 other countries have promised the United States to open their official procurement markets to the United States in return for America opening its own to them. (All of these governments have carved out various agreed on exemptions. And sub-national governments are covered by these deals as well.)

With stakes this high, you’d think that at some point the U.S. government would display reasonably consistent interest during the multi-decade lives of these trade agreements in whether they’ve been paying off. But according to the GAO researchers, you’d be wrong.

Even though the GPA requires detailed, annual reporting of procurement statistics by signatory governments, the GAO’s

“review of data that the United States and next five largest GPA parties [the European Union, Japan, Canada, South Korea, and Norway] submitted to the WTO for 2008 through 2013 found that a number of parties did not submit the reports annually, the submitted reports did not include all required data, and each party’s reports included inconsistencies that limit the data’s comparability. Further, a lack of common understanding on definitions of key terms has led to inconsistent reporting practices among the GPA parties, and a GPA statistical working group has made little progress in addressing such challenges.”

Some specific failings:

>”although Canada submitted annual notifications with central government procurement data for 2008 through 2013, the notifications did not include data on procurement by subcentral governments or by other government entities”;

>”Japan’s annual notifications have not included procurement by entities such as utilities and state-owned enterprises that are covered by the GPA”:

>”South Korea has not submitted notifications for any year except 2010, and Japan has not submitted a notification for 2012 although it did so for other years through 2013.”

>”Of the U.S. FTAs [free trade agreements] we reviewed, only NAFTA requires its parties to report annual statistics on government procurement; however, the last data exchange between the three NAFTA parties took place in 2005. As a result, information about the extent to which U.S. FTA partner governments open procurement to U.S. suppliers is not available.” [Emphasis added.]

The United States has been far from a whiz in reporting, either. But its failings have been much less excusable given all the evidence provided by the GAO showing that it’s opened its procurement markets much wider than any other GPA or FTA signatory. Despite the above data limitations, the GAO nonetheless felt confident in concluding that for 2010, “[T]he United States reported more than twice as much GPA-covered government procurement as the next five largest GPA parties combined, although total U.S. government procurement is less than the combined total for the other five parties.”

In money terms, the value of contracts opened to non-discriminatory bidding by the United States at all levels of government was $837 billion. The value of contracts opened by those five non-U.S. GPA parties that promised to liberalize the most in absolute terms was some $381 billion. Yet total government procurement in the United States that year was some $1.7 trillion, the GAO estimates. For the other five GPA signatories, it was much larger – $4.4 trillion.

Moreover, because of the aforementioned reporting failures, it’s not possible at all for the U.S. government, or the American people, to gauge procurement liberalization under free trade agreements – with the exception of Canada. But when their procurement budgets are added in, and duplication eliminated (e.g., for Canada), the total market that should be available to American business and workers at least in principle is $4.4 trillion. 

The GAO doesn’t conclude that U.S. trade partners are simply capitalizing on Washington’s indifference to flout their treat obligations. In fact, in one instance, it even tries to get them partly off the hook: “Many EU member states, as well as Japan and South Korea, have actual government expenditures smaller than the United States’ and are therefore likely to have more smaller-value individual procurement contracts that fall below the GPA threshold levels.” (Decisions on the smallest government contracts typically are one of the main GPA and FTA procurement carve-outs.)

But if so many foreign government contracts are too small to be opened for non-discriminatory bidding, then obviously these trade deals are too poorly structured to give American producers anything remotely like reciprocity. And more important, Washington so far has had no way of knowing judging by any measures whether non-discrimination in principle is being translated into non-discrimination in fact .

As Mr. Trump’s Commerce Secretary, Wilbur Ross, recently noted, “There’s not a lot of point making trade deals if you don’t enforce them.” He could have added that such enforcement is impossible without seeking and obtaining reliable data on results. Donald Trump’s predecessors have flunked these two crucial tests of American trade policy-making. Until he gets strong evidence to the contrary, it’s time for the president to take the logical next step, assume that the GPA and the FTA government procurement measures have been serious mistakes, and ignore them as thoroughly as America’s competitors evidently have.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: A Comeback for the U.S. Trade Deficit – & Most (but not all!) of the Usual Suspects

Tags

Canada, China, energy, exports, GDP, Germany, gross domestic product, high tech goods, imports, Korea, Made in Washington trade deficit, manufactures, Mexico, NAFTA, non-oil goods deficit, North American Free Trade Agreement, oil, recovery, Trade, trade deficit, Trump, {What's Left of) Our Economy

America’s goods and services trade deficit recorded a near-double-digit sequential increase in January to hit $48.49 billion. That monthly total was the highest since March, 2012’s $50.22 billion. Combined goods and services exports inched up sequentially to $192.04 billion – their best performance since December, 2014’s $197.46 billion. But total imports grew some four times faster, to $240.59 billion. That total also was the highest since December, 2014 ($241.21 billion).

America’s pre-inflation oil trade deficit spurred much of the total trade gap’s January rise, soaring by nearly 25 percent sequentially to $7.56 billion – the highest level since July, 2015’s $8.01 billion. An 18.37 percent surge in imports to $16.87 billion, the highest total since January, 2015’s $19.63 billion produced much of this result. But the huge, chronic U.S. manufacturing trade deficit also shot up in January – from $69.52 billion to $75.54 billion. And following a record December monthly plunge in its volatile trade balance, the shortfall in high tech goods more than doubled in January, to $8.46 billion.

The massive and longstanding American merchandise deficit with China rebounded by nearly 13 percent in January from a nine-month low to reach $31.30 billion. The main culprit – the biggest decrease in monthly goods exports to China (13.37 percent) since last January’s 18.87 percent plunge. The goods gap with NAFTA partner Canada jumped by more than 68 percent on month, to $3.62 billion. And the merchandise deficit with free trade partner Korea more than doubled, from a nearly two-year low, to $2.59 billion. Yet the U.S. merchandise deficit with Germany — whose big global surpluses have just been targeted by the Trump administration — hit its lowest level ($4.88 billion) since last February ($4.51 billion), and that with Mexico shrank by just over 10 percent, to $3.95 billion. That was its lowest level since July, 2015 ($3.71 billion).

Most troubling, however, the Made in Washington trade deficit – the gap in goods other than oil that is heavily affected by U.S. trade policy – rose by more than five percent on month to hit $61.43 billion. That total, the highest since March, 2015’s $61.90 billion, signals that the trade drag on the already sluggish current American economic recovery will increase further in the first quarter of this year.

Here are selected highlights of the latest monthly (January) trade balance figures released this morning by the Census Bureau:

>In January, the U.S. trade deficit hit $48.49 billion – its highest monthly level since March, 2012’s $50.22 billion.

>The January total represented a 9.56 percent increase over the December total, which was adjusted only fractionally downward, to $44.26 billion.

>Combined goods and services exports of $192.09 billion represented a 0.56 percent increase over the upwardly revised December figure of $191.01 billion – and the highest monthly result since December, 2014’s $197.46 billion total.

>But combined goods and services imports grew by 2.26 percent in January, from an upwardly revised December level of $225.27 billion to $240.59 billion. That total was also the highest since December, 2014 ($241.21 billion).

>Much of the January trade deficit increase resulted from a 24.72 percent monthly pop in the current-dollar U.S. oil trade deficit. The $7.56 billion total was the highest since July, 2015’s $8.01 billion.

>Pre-inflation oil exports increased by 13.68 percent on month in January, from $8.20 billion to $9.32 billion. But imports surged by 18.37 percent – from $14.26 billion to $16.87 billion. That was their highest total since January, 2015’s $19.63 billion.

>But January’s poor U.S. trade performance was also fueled by an 8.66 percent increase in the massive and chronic manufacturing trade gap, from $69.52 billion to $755.54 billion.

>Manufactures exports sank by 7.02 percent sequentially in January, from $89.36 billion to $83.09 billion. But manufactures imports dipped by only 0.16 percent, from $158.88 billion to $158.62 billion.

>Within manufacturing, the high tech goods deficit worsened dramatically in January, as the monthly shortfall rebounded from a record (71.78 percent) sequential drop in December, to $3.82 billion, to $8.46 billion – i.e., a more-than-doubling.

>U.S. high tech goods exports plummeted in January by 18.93 percent – from $32.18 billion in December to $26.06 billion. Imports, however, declined by only 4.11 percent, from $36.00 billion to $34.52 billion.

>The wider January trade deficits in manufacturing and high tech goods were no doubt linked to the 12.78 percent increase in the American merchandise trade shortfall with China – from $27.76 billion in December (the lowest such figure since last April’s $24.31 billion) to $31.30 billion.

>U.S. goods exports to China fell by 13.37 percent on month in January – from $11.63 billion to $10.07 billion. That was the biggest sequential decrease since last January’s 18.87 percent. U.S. goods imports from China hit $41.38 billion – a 5.07 percent rise from December’s $39.38 billion.

>America’s merchandise deficit with Canada skyrocketed in January by 68.37 percent, from $2.15 billion in December to $3.62 billion. U.S. goods exports to this North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) partner fell 2.35 percent on month, but imports advanced by 4.17 percent.

>The goods deficit with bilateral free trade partner Korea more than doubled in January, from $1.20 billion (the lowest such total since February, 2014’s $1.08 billion) to $2.59 billion. America’s merchandise exports to Korea ticked up by 0.27 percent on month, but its merchandise imports were up 8.91 percent.

>Since the bilateral trade deal went into effect in March, 2012, the U.S. merchandise deficit with Korea has roughly quintupled on a monthly basis.

>By contrast, even though the Trump administration has recently criticized Germany’s burgeoning global trade surpluses, the American merchandise deficit with that country actually shrank on month by 8.72 percent to $4.88 billion.  That was its lowest level since February, 2014 ($4.51 billion).

>Similarly, the United States’ merchandise deficit with its other NAFTA partner, Mexico, fell by 10.13 percent, from $4.39 billion to $3.95 billion. That’s its lowest level since July, 2015 ($3.71 billion).

>At the same time, the 5.21 percent monthly rise in the January real non-oil U.S. goods deficit of $61.43 billion – the biggest such total since March, 2015’s $61.90 billion – spells trouble for American economic growth in the first quarter of this year. This Made in Washington deficit – which strips out areas like energy and services, which are only slightly impacted by American trade policies – influences the most closely followed gross domestic product figures, which are inflation-adjusted.

>Although the final fourth quarter 2016 results are not yet available, preliminary figures so far show that the strong growth of this policy-shaped trade deficit has slowed the cumulative pace of the nation’s historically weak economic recovery by fully 20.56 percent – or $434.78 billion.

(What’s Left of) Our Economy: Some Real Fake News on Trump and Trade Data

Tags

Canada, data, domestic exports, economic growth, exports, imports, imports for consumption, Jobs, manufacturing, Mexico, NAFTA, North American Free Trade Agreement, Public Citizen, re-exports, The Wall Street Journal, Trade, Trump, {What's Left of) Our Economy

Talk about a non-story. That some globalization cheerleaders have tried to blow up into a scandal. And all because the Trump administration seems to be interested in correcting important distortions in some commonly used U.S. trade data that presents a misleading picture of America’s exports, imports, and trade balances.

Here’s the situation. Last Sunday, The Wall Street Journal reported that  “The Trump administration is considering changing the way it calculates U.S. trade deficits, a shift that would make the country’s trade gap appear larger than it had in past years, according to people involved in the discussions.”

According to the Journal, “The leading idea under consideration would exclude from U.S. exports any goods first imported into the country, such as cars, and then transferred to a third country like Canada or Mexico unchanged….”

Continued the article, “Economists say that approach would inflate trade deficit numbers because it would typically count goods as imports when they come into the country but not count the same goods when they go back out, known as re-exports.”

So in other words, President Trump and his minions are thinking of artificially deflating the figures describing what the United States sells to the rest of the world, but not making a corresponding change on the import side that would reduce the amount of goods that the nation buys from its trade partners. The result would be a larger U.S. trade deficit, and added ammo for the administration’s claim that America’s trade policy needs major surgery. Talk about creating “alternative facts,” right?

That’s what the Journal‘s editorial board concluded. Charged these trade zealots, the Trump-ers’ “effort to recalculate U.S. trade flows to show larger deficits” is a “trick….borrowed from the political left” that “deserves to be hooted down as an attempt to manipulate statistics to assist bad economic policy [i.e., curbs on trade flows].”

But these allegations aren’t even close to the mark – that is, if you believe the Journal‘s own reporting. For as the original piece eventually reveals (based, as is the entire article, on anonymous sources), the president’s team is indeed mulling making those import data changes, too – which would involve switching the import measure “to ‘imports for consumption,’ a slightly narrower way of measuring imports that would make less of a difference in the overall balance. “

Which means that – weirdly – the Journal reporters decided not to tell those outraged economists that the supposed Trump administration exercise would make statistically valid symmetrical changes, or that these (of course nameless) economists received this info from the reporters and decided to ignore it in order to try to create the appearance of impropriety. It also means that Journal editorial writers either didn’t read their own publication’s coverage all the way through, or chose to ignore that decisive material. Either way, someone has just massively violated their profession’s ethics.

As for the change (reportedly) under consideration itself, it’s entirely justified because those re-exports that under the main system for presenting trade data are counted as real exports literally are not Made in America. As indicated above, they enter the U.S. economy from abroad and then are shipped overseas (or across the border to Canada or Mexico) in nearly all cases entirely or virtually unchanged.

This means that they add virtually nothing to American economic growth or employment – a major and entirely valid reason that exports are so beloved). And although, as some trade advocates claim, their transit into and through the United States creates logistical jobs (in transportation and,warehousing services), such logistical jobs would be created anyway if those goods were domestically produced (Unless you think that such products typically don’t need to be stored after production and then transported to customers, too?)

Moreover, the distortions resulting from sloppy methodology of the main exports numbers are anything but bupkis. Last year, for example, failing to strip out foreign-produced goods boosted total U.S. merchandise exports by 15.43 percent – or $224.33 billion. Relatively speaking, the impact on manufactures exports was even bigger – 17.48 percent, or $223.36 billion.

And the effects on America’s goods exports to Mexico and Canada, its partners in the controversial North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), are especially noteworthy. Proper counting would reduce 2016 U.S. merchandise exports to the former by 23.19 percent and manufactures exports by 25.30 percent. The comparable numbers for Canada are 17.14 percent and 17.93 percent.

Moreover, since proper counting has little effect on import totals, either globally or for NAFTA trade, raising its profile would definitely show higher U.S. deficits. And the export gap has been growing steadily across the board.

Fittingly, this story can be closed on an absurd note, too. As indicated above, the U.S. government already compiles and reports (though in an unsatisfactorily low-profile way), export and import data that quantify exports actually produced in America, and imports actually consumed in America (although, as discussed in this solid Public Citizen analyses, the import numbers could still use some improvement). So a changeover to more accurate figures that reveal trade’s true impact on U.S. production and job creation looks to be pretty easy. Think we’ll be reading about that in The Wall Street Journal?