Obviously, trade policies are a hot topic right now, whether it's the Trump admimistration's focus on what it calls "unfair" trade and a focus on returning production to the US to the resulting failure of the TPP trade agreement earlier this year to the IMF and others warning about growing protectionist measures by countries across the globe.
That said, those of us here at SCDigest, like we suspect is true for nearly all Americans, really have no idea what is going on with things like tariffs between the US and its trading partners in any detail.
Wilbur Ross, secretary of commerce under Trump, provided some useful information this week in a guest column in the Wall Street Journal, which included the graphic below that shows tariff levels across a number of product categories for the US, the EU and China:
As can be seen, China's tariffs are higher than those of the US in 20 of the 22 major categories of goods. Europe imposes higher tariffs than the US in 17 of 22 categories, though the chart does show that Chinese tariffs are generally much higher than those of the EU.
Ross notes, for example, that "The EU charges a 10% tariff on imported American cars, while the US imposes only a 2.5% tariff on imported European cars," while saying that "China, which is the world's largest automobile market, has a 25% tariff on imported vehicles and imposes even higher tariffs on luxury vehicles."
When it comes to trade in goods, our deficits with China and the EU are $347 billion and $146.8 billion, respectively.
What to do if anything to address that situation is unclear, but SCDigest found this tariff data quite interesting.
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