The 2024 Corden Public Lecture was presented on Monday 27 May by Dr Mary Amiti, Federal Reserve Bank of New York. She spoke on the topic 'Winners and losers in the US-China trade war'.
The US applied tariffs of 10 to 50 per cent on $362 billion of imports from China in 2018-2019. In response, China retaliated by imposing tariffs of similar magnitude on $107 billion dollars of US exports. This type of behavior is commonly referred to as a "trade war". The US-China trade war resulted in a tripling of the average US duty on imports, rising from 1.6 percent to 5.5.
The Trump administration’s main stated objectives of imposing such tariffs were to preserve value of US intellectual property and to create jobs at home, with assurances that this would happen without any cost to US firms or consumers.
In this lecture, Dr Amiti will examine the consequences of the US-China trade war on the US economy, and show that the Trump administration’s objectives were not met, instead, the trade-war imposed very large losses on US consumers and firms.
About Dr Mary Amiti
Mary Amiti is the Head of Labor and Product Market Studies within the Monetary Policy Research Division at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Prior to joining the Bank, she held positions at the International Monetary Fund, World Bank, the University of Melbourne, La Trobe University and the University of Pompeu Fabra. She graduated with a PhD in Economics from the London School of Economics in 1997, with a specialisation in international trade. She is a co-editor of the Journal of International Economics. She is a Research Associate of the Centre for Economic and Policy Research (CEPR) and a Fellow of the Econometric Society.
Dr Amiti has published in leading journals such as the American Economic Review, Quarterly Journal of Economics, Journal of Political Economy, Review of Economic Studies, Review of Economics and Statistics, and Journal of International Economics. Her research interests include trade finance; the effects of trade liberalization on productivity, wages, the wage skill premium, and product quality; exchange rate pass-through and dominant currencies; and global value chains and inflation.