>These claims are misleading. The Administration has proposed to
>facilitate China’s entry into the WTO at a time when the U.S.
>already has a massive trade deficit with China. In 1999, the U.S.
>imported approximately $81 billion in goods from China and exported
>$13 billion – a six-to-one ratio of imports to exports that
>represents the most unbalanced relationship in the history of U.S.
>trade. 2 While exports generated about 170,000 jobs in the United
>States in 1999, imports eliminated almost 1.1 million domestic job
>opportunities, for a net loss of 880,000 high-wage manufacturing
>jobs.
This is pretty standard arithmetic for anti-free traders, but is it justified? With some 22 million new jobs in this expansion, talk of job loss lacks political resonance - but let's leave cycles out of this. The import job loss numbers just take the free traders' hype and put negative signs in front of it: what if both set of claims are overblown? (Does Scott adjust for sectors? If exports are in high-wage sectors and imports in low-wage, is such direct equivalence justified? Were imports from China restricted, would there be a one-to-one replacement by domestic production? Would higher U.S. wages mean higher prices and therefore less expenditures on other goods & services?) And if trade in general does stimulate growth, then employment overall is higher than it would be without trade, so talk of job loss is kind of academic.
Doug