Casualties of Trade Wars

Abstract

Although trade wars have existed throughout modern history, there is little empirical evidence as to how countries choose which industries to target for retaliatory tariffs. We develop a political economy model of trade policy to explain a country’s choice of product for retaliation and test the implications of this model using the choices of seven countries in two retaliation episodes: (1) the US imposition of steel and aluminum tariffs in 2018 and (2) the US passage of the Continued Dumping and Subsidy Offset Act (CDSOA) in 2000. The empirical results from a binary choice regression indicate that countries are more likely to sanction products with higher trade values and those in which they can extract terms-of-trade welfare, suggesting that trade wars move countries back to a terms-of-trade driven prisoner’s dilemma equilibrium. We find a significant amount of heterogeneity in the degree to which countries consider the political importance of the industry when developing their retaliation list; while countries such as the EU and Canada clearly targeted politically important industries in 2018, we find little evidence that emerging markets did so. There is also little evidence that the EU and Canada targeted politically important industries in retaliation against the CDSOA.