Making America great again? The economic impacts of Liberation Day tariffs

• 成果类型: Article
• 署名作者: Ignatenko, Anna; Lashkaripour, Ahmad; Macedoni, Luca; Simonovska, Ina
• 署名单位: Norwegian School of Economics (NHH); Indiana University System; Indiana University Bloomington; University of Milan; University of California System; University of California Davis; National Bureau of Economic Research
• 刊物名称: JOURNAL OF INTERNATIONAL ECONOMICS
• ISSN/ISSBN: 0022-1996
• DOI: 10.1016/j.jinteco.2025.104138
• 发表日期: 2025
• 关键词: tariff; Tariff war; Deficit; welfare; TRADE; Trump; Liberation Day; CHINA

摘要

On April 2, 2025, President Trump declared Liberation Day, announcing broad tariffs to reduce trade deficits and revive U.S. industry. We analyze the long-term economic impacts of these tariffs. If trading partners do not retaliate, the tariffs could decrease the U.S. trade deficit and improve its terms of trade, yielding modest welfare gains when tariff revenues reduce the income tax burden for American workers. However, reciprocal retaliation results in net welfare losses for the U.S. economy. We derive the unilaterally optimal tariff policy and find that the USTR proposed tariffs, based on bilateral trade deficits, diverge markedly from the optimal design. The optimal tariff is 19%, uniformly applied across all trading partners, and determined solely by the aggregate trade deficit, rather than bilateral imbalances. Under optimal foreign retaliation to the USTR tariffs, U.S. welfare declines by up to 3.38% when accounting for input-output linkages, while global employment contracts by 0.58%.