Donald Trump’s hugely disruptive trade war is setting the stage for a manufacturing renaissance in the US, administration officials say. Outside the White House, many economists are skeptical.
Global trade experts point to many reasons they believe the president’s tariffs will fail to bring about a major resurgence of manufacturing, among them: Trump’s erratic, constantly changing policies, his unfocused, across-the-board tariffs, and his replacing Joe Biden’s carrot-and-stick approach to brandish sticks at the world.
“I think [Trump’s tariffs] will reduce the competitiveness of US manufacturing, and will reduce manufacturing employment,” said Michael Strain, an economist at the conservative American Enterprise Institute (AEI). “They’re raising the costs of production to US manufacturing companies, and that makes manufacturers less competitive. There will be some winners and some losers, but the losers will outnumber the winners.”
‘Trump keeps changing his mind’
The president and his aides insist that higher tariffs on more than 100 countries – making goods imported from overseas more expensive – will spur domestic manufacturing. “The ‘Made in USA’ label is set to resume its global dominance under President Trump,” the White House spokesperson Kush Desai claimed recently.
But few economists see that happening. Ann E Harrison, an economics professor and former dean of the Haas School of Business at the University of California, Berkeley, said the erratic, on-again-off-again rollout of Trump’s tariffs has already gone far to doom the president’s hopes of inspiring a huge wave of manufacturing investment.
“For the policy to be successful, it has to be consistent over a long period,” she told the Guardian. “People need to believe it’s going to last. Some factories take five years to plan and build. You’re talking a long-term play. But Trump keeps changing his mind. Even over the last six months, we’ve had very little consistency.
“The other problem is that he’s old, and no one is sure he’s going to be around that long. These policies need to be consistent, and that’s not happening.”
Economists point to another question mark that is causing corporate executives to think twice about building factories in the US. In May, the US court of international trade ruled that Trump’s blanket tariffs are illegal – a decision that is under appeal.
Strain, at the AEI, said: “When you add into the equation the erratic nature of President Trump’s tariff regime, when you add the question of its questionable illegality, when you add that none of this is going through Congress, when you add that even when the US secures a ‘deal’ with another country, it’s not really a deal, there are major outstanding questions.”
France doesn’t think its alcohol exports will be hit by tariffs as part of the European Union’s agreement to pay 15% tariffs, noted Strain. “That’s a big question mark that would never go unresolved in any regular, traditional trade deal,” he said. “That’s all part of the massive uncertainty we’re seeing.”
The Biden administration used deliberate industrial policies to boost several strategic industries, most notably semiconductors and electric vehicles, including a 100% tariff on EVs from China and 25% on lithium-ion EV batteries, as well as subsidies to buy EVs and build EV-related factories. The policies resulted in a surge in new factories to build semiconductors, electric vehicles and EV components.
Biden “said we care about semiconductors and national security, and what he’d try to do is get actual investors to invest in it”, said Dani Rodrik, an economist specializing in trade and industrial policy at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, who predicted Trump’s blanket tariffs will prove less successful in inspiring investment. “If you really want to increase manufacturing and employment in the US, you’d go about it in a very different way, through industrial policies that first identify specific segments you care about.”
When China, Japan and South Korea adopted policies to build their electronics and auto industries, they insisted that the corporations that benefited from those policies compete with foreign companies to help make them globally competitive. “For industrial policy to succeed, it has to work to promote more competition,” said Harrison, at the Haas School of Business. “The problem with tariffs is they do just the opposite. They restrict competition.”
Susan Helper, an economist at Case Western Reserve University who worked on industrial policy in the Biden and Obama administrations, said Trump’s tariff rates on some countries and markets – like 15% on the EU, Japan and South Korea – are too low to spur much investment, questioning why a company would build a major factory to circumvent such a duty.
“A [semiconductor fabrication] plant, that’s a billion dollars. You need to get a payback and that takes several years,” Helper said. “If the tariffs are 145% [as Trump once imposed on China], that’s attractive for building a plant. But if they fall back to 15%, then it’s really hard to get a return on your investment.”
The administration boasts that several of its trade deals have specific commitments to spur huge manufacturing investment. It says its deal with the EU includes a $600bn investment pledge; with Japan, a $550bn investment pledge; and with South Korea, $350bn. Jamieson Greer, US trade representative, wrote in the New York Times: “These investments – 10 times larger than the inflation-adjusted value of the Marshall Plan that rebuilt Europe after World War II – will accelerate US reindustrialization.”
But these supposed pledges have attracted skepticism. After all, this president claimed during his first term that “the eighth wonder of the world” was being built in Wisconsin after FoxConn pledged to invest $10bn and create 13,000 jobs at an electronics plant. But that promise fell embarrassingly short.
Many economists question whether the EU, Japan or South Korea can force corporations to make a specific investment in the US. Indeed, a European Commission spokesperson said the bloc had expressed “aggregate intentions” that are “in no way” binding. “These large numbers really sound like window dressing, some round numbers they’re throwing around,” said Harvard’s Rodrik.
“Some include investments you were already going to make, and some are aspirational,” said Todd Tucker, a trade and industrial policy expert at the Roosevelt Institute. “Once we’ve had time to evaluate whether the investment happens or not, Trump will be on to the next press cycle.”
In recent years, manufacturing employment has been trending downward – not just in advanced industrial countries, but also in China, as new technologies enable factories to churn out goods more efficiently, with fewer workers. That trend raises questions whether Trump’s trade policies can increase factory jobs in the US.
‘An island of backwardness’
The US is past its manufacturing peak, Berkeley’s Harrison noted. “That was actually during World War Two, and it has been declining ever since,” she said. “I don’t see manufacturing’s share of the economy or manufacturing employment reversing.”
She added: “If the question is, are you going to bring about a major resurgence in manufacturing employment, it’s not just unlikely, the answer is no. More and more manufacturing is robot-driven and not done by people.”
Auto industry officials in the US complain that Trump’s 50% tariffs on steel and aluminum have increased their costs and injured their competitiveness. “In manufacturing, for every one job in steel production, there are 80 jobs that use steel,” the AEI’s Strain said. “So putting tariffs on imported steel might help that one guy, but you’re hurting the other 80 people.”
A study by Federal Reserve economists found that the tariffs Trump imposed in his first term were actually associated with a reduction in factory jobs nationwide, because increased input costs and retaliatory tariffs outweighed import protection from tariffs.
Helper, at Case Western Reserve University, warned that the US auto industry would be hurt badly by Trump’s mishmash of tariffs coupled with his slashing subsidies for EVs. “Trump’s policies are setting the auto industry up to be an island of backwardness,” she said. “The rest of the world is going to be making EVs, but we’re going to be focused on making really high profits on pickup trucks that will be bad for the climate and won’t sell in the rest of the world.
“We’ll have a great, competitive position in large, gas-guzzling pickups, but we’ll fall further behind in EVs. That’s a very risky and dangerous path.”
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