For hundreds of years, policymakers and academics have puzzled over how to add up the effects of trade and trade barriers on economic activity. The literature is vast. Trade theory generally focuses on the question of whether trade or trade barriers, like tariffs, make people and firms better off using models of the real economy operating at full employment and a net-zero trade balance. They yield powerful fundamental intuition but are not well equipped to address issues such as capital accumulation, the role of exchange rate depreciation, monetary policy, intertemporal optimization by consumers, or current account deficits, which permeate policy debates over tariffs. The literature on open-economy macroeconomics provides additional tools to address some of these issues, but neither literature has yet been able to answer definitively the question of what impact tariffs have on infant industries, current account deficits, unemployment, or inequality, which remain open empirical questions. Trade economists have only begun to understand how multiproduct retailers affect who ultimately pays tariffs and still are struggling to meaningfully model unemployment in a tractable way conducive to fast or uniform application to policy analysis, while macro approaches overlook sectoral complexity. The field’s understanding of the importance of endogenous capital investment is growing, but it has not internalized the importance of the same intertemporal trade-offs between savings and consumption for assessing the distributional impacts of trade on households. Dispersion across assessments of the impacts of the U.S.–China trade war illustrates the frontiers that economists face assessing the macroeconomic impacts of tariffs.
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Tariffs and the Macroeconomy
Xiangtao Meng, Katheryn N. Russ, and Sanjay R. Singh
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Economic Geography and Trade
Anthony J. Venables
Economic activity is unevenly distributed across space, both internationally and within countries. What determines this spatial distribution, and how is it shaped by trade? Classical trade theory gives the insights of comparative advantage and gains from trade but is firmly aspatial, modeling countries as points and trade (in goods and factors of production) as either perfectly frictionless or impossible. Modern theory places this in a spatial context in which geographical considerations influence the volume of trade between places. Gravity models tell us that distance is important, with each doubling of distance between places halving the volume of trade. Modeling the location decisions of firms gives a theory of location of activity based on factor costs (as in classical theory) and also on proximity to markets, proximity to suppliers, and the extent of competition in each market. It follows from this that—if there is a high degree of mobility—firms and economic activity as a whole may tend to cluster, providing an explanation of observed spatial unevenness. In some circumstances falling trade barriers may trigger the deindustrialization of some areas as activity clusters in fewer places. In other circumstances falling barriers may enable activity to spread out, reducing inequalities within and between countries. Research over the past several decades has established the mechanisms that cause these changes and placed them in full general equilibrium models of the economy. Empirical work has quantified many of the important relationships. However, geography and trade remains an area where progress is needed to develop robust tools that can be used to inform place-based policies (concerning trade, transport, infrastructure, and local economic development), particularly in view of the huge expenditures that such policies incur.
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Economic History of the United States: Precolonial and Colonial Periods
Peter C. Mancall
The economy of territory that became the United States evolved dramatically from ca. 1000 ce to 1776. Before Europeans arrived, the spread of maize agriculture shifted economic practices in Indigenous communities. The arrival of Europeans, starting with the Spanish in the West Indies in 1492, brought wide-ranging change, including the spread of Old World infectious disease and the arrival of land- and resource-hungry migrants. Europeans, eager to extract material wealth, came to rely on the trade in enslaved Africans to produce profitable crops such as tobacco, rice, and sugar, and they maintained connections with Indigenous communities to sustain the fur trade. The declining number of Indigenous peoples, combined with growing numbers of those of European or African origin, altered the demographic profile of North America, particularly in the territory east of the Mississippi River. Over time, Europeans’ consumer choices expanded, though the wealth gap between white colonists grew, as did the economic gap between free colonists, on the one hand, and unfree Black and Native peoples on the other.
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The Impact of Brexit
Jonathan Portes
Brexit resulted in major changes to the United Kingdom’s economic relationship with the European Union. The U.K.–E.U. Trade and Cooperation Agreement provides for tariff-free trade but has also resulted in the introduction of customs controls and various non-tariff barriers. In addition, the ending of free movement of workers between the United Kingdom and the EU was accompanied by major changes to the UK’s system for work-related migration.
These changes have resulted in a reduction in UK trade compared to other advanced economies, with goods exports most adversely affected. However, the proportion of overall UK trade that is with the EU does not yet appear to have fallen. Investment has also suffered. However, a fall in migration from EU countries has been at least offset by very large increases in migration from the rest of the world, particularly in the health sector.
Overall, UK GDP growth has underperformed synthetic counterfactuals by about 5% since the Brexit referendum, but a substantial proportion of this is likely to reflect factors not directly related to Brexit: comparisons with other large European economies are much less negative. Nevertheless, Brexit has had a negative impact on growth. Looking forward, this impact is likely to grow, although it could in part be offset by improvements to the UK’s regulatory framework, or mitigated by changes to the Trade and Cooperation Agreement.
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Globalization, Trade, and Health Economics
Richard Smith and Johanna Hanefeld
Global trade—the movement of goods, services, people, and capital between countries—is at the center of modern globalization. Since the late 20th century trade has also become established as a critical determinant of public health. As the raison d’être of trade is to increase both wealth and the availability of goods and services, changing trade patterns will inevitably impact many of the known determinants of health, including employment, nutrition, environmental factors, social capital, and education. Trade will also impact the health sector itself, most clearly through direct trade in health-related goods and services (such as pharmaceuticals, health workers, foreign direct investment in health services, and mobile patients), but also more broadly in determining tax receipts and thus overall public expenditures. It is also the case that trade—especially rapid and widespread movement of people, animals, and goods—may facilitate the rapid and widespread spread of disease. Trade, and associated policies governing and responding to that trade, has thus become increasingly recognized as a critical driver of health issues.
The design of trade policies that reduce the potential health risks associated with freer trade while maximizing the positive impact of trade liberalization on the social determinants of health is still in its infancy. There remains a lack of sound empirical evidence demonstrating how trade liberalization links directly and indirectly to health. Even though the positive link between increased trade, poverty reduction, and economic growth is widely accepted, evidence regarding the impact of trade liberalization on the social determinants of health varies from one national context to another. Hence, adapting trade liberalization to national conditions is important in ensuring desired outcomes. Yet although evidence is necessary, it is not sufficient to ensure that health is more integrated in trade negotiations and decision-making. There is a substantive requirement for those with a health remit to engage in negotiation with those from other sectors and from other geographic locations.
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The Economics of Diet and Obesity: Understanding the Global Trends
Fabrice Etilé and Lisa Oberlander
In the last several decades obesity rates have risen significantly. In 2014, 10.8% and 14.9% of the world’s men and women, respectively, were obese as compared with 3.2% and 6.4% in 1975. The obesity “epidemic” has spread from high-income countries to emerging and developing ones in every region of the world. The rising obesity rates are essentially explained by a rise in total calorie intake associated with long-term global changes in the food supply. Food has become more abundant, available, and cheaper, but food affluence is associated with profound changes in the nutritional quality of supply. While calories have become richer in fats, sugar, and sodium, they are now lower in fiber. The nutrition transition from starvation to abundance and high-fat/sugar/salt food is thus accompanied by an epidemiological transition from infectious diseases and premature death to chronic diseases and longer lives. Food-related chronic diseases have important economic consequences in terms of human capital and medical care costs borne by public and private insurances and health systems.
Technological innovations, trade globalization, and retailing expansion are associated with these substantial changes in the quantity and quality of food supply and diet in developed as well as in emerging and rapidly growing economies. Food variety has significantly increased due to innovations in the food production process. Raw food is broken down to obtain elementary substances that are subsequently assembled for producing final food products. This new approach, as well as improvements in cold chain and packaging, has contributed to a globalization of food chains and spurred an increase of trade in food products, which, jointly with foreign direct investments, alters the domestic food supply. Finally, technological advancements have also favored the emergence of large supermarkets and retailers, which have transformed the industrial organization of consumer markets.
How do these developments affect population diets and diet-related diseases? Identifying the contribution of supply factors to long-term changes in diet and obesity is important because it can help to design innovative, effective, and evidence-based policies, such as regulations on trade, retailing, and quality or incentives for product reformulation. Yet this requires a correct evaluation of the importance and causal effects of supply-side factors on the obesity pandemic. Among others, the economic literature analyzes the effect of changes in food prices, food availability, trade, and marketing on the nutrition and epidemiological transitions. There is a lack of causal robust evidence on their long-term effects. The empirical identification of causal effects is de facto challenging because the dynamics of food supply is partly driven by demand-side factors and dynamics, like a growing female labor force, habit formation, and the social dynamics of preferences.
There are several important limitations to the literature from the early 21st century. Existing studies cover mostly well-developed countries, use static economic and econometric specifications, and employ data that cover short periods of time unmarked by profound shifts in food supply. In contrast, empirical research on the long-term dynamics of consumer behavior is much more limited, and comparative studies across diverse cultural and institutional backgrounds are almost nonexistent. Studies on consumers in emerging countries could exploit the rapid time changes and large spatial heterogeneity, both to identify the causal impacts of shocks on supply factors and to document how local culture and institutions shape diet and nutritional outcomes.
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Economics of Agglomeration
Jacques-François Thisse
Despite the drop in transport and commuting costs since the mid-19th century, sizable and lasting differences across locations at very different spatial scales remain the most striking feature of the space-economy. The main challenges of the economics of agglomeration are therefore (a) to explain why people and economic activities are agglomerated in a few places and (b) to understand why some places fare better than others.
To meet these challenges, the usual route is to appeal to the fundamental trade-off between (internal and external) increasing returns and various mobility costs. This trade-off has a major implication for the organization of the space-economy: High transport and commuting costs foster the dispersion of economic activities, while strong increasing returns act as a strong agglomeration force.
The first issue is to explain the existence of large and persistent regional disparities within nations or continents. At that spatial scale, the mobility of commodities and production factors is critical. By combining new trade theories with the mobility of firms and workers, economic geography shows that a core periphery structure can emerge as a stable market outcome.
Second, at the urban scale, cities stem from the interplay between agglomeration and dispersion forces: The former explain why firms and consumers want to be close to each other whereas the latter put an upper limit on city sizes. Housing and commuting costs, which increase with population size, are the most natural candidates for the dispersion force. What generates agglomeration forces is less obvious. The literature on urban economics has highlighted the fact that urban size is the source of various benefits, which increase firm productivity and consumer welfare.
Within cities, agglomeration also occurs in the form of shopping districts where firms selling differentiated products congregate. Strategic location considerations and product differentiation play a central role in the emergence of commercial districts because firms compete with a small number of close retailers.
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International Trade, Wages, and Unemployment
Priyaranjan Jha
Traditional trade theory has focused on the allocation of resources between various sectors of the economy and how it changes in response to trade liberalization while maintaining the assumption of free mobility of resources across sectors within an economy. This simplifying assumption is at odds with empirical evidence which shows considerable frictions in the movement of resources between sectors, at least in the short to medium run. Workers who lose their jobs in the import competing sector may find it hard to find a job immediately in the export sector. This has given rise to a growing literature that incorporates frictions in the mobility of factors of production in general, and labor in particular, in trade models. This article surveys the literature on trade and unemployment where unemployment is caused by search frictions or wage rigidity of some kind such as minimum wage, efficiency wage, or implicit contracts. While the focus is on unemployment, any model studying the impact of trade on labor markets features wage effects, too, and a brief discussion of wage effects is also provided. Trade affects unemployment in these multi-sector models through two main channels: sectoral unemployment rates and intersectoral reallocation of resources. In newer trade models with heterogeneous firms, trade can change unemployment by affecting the allocation of resources within a sector. While the theoretical models in this literature identify various channels through which trade liberalization affects unemployment, many of these channels have opposing implications for unemployment, rendering the net effect of trade liberalization on unemployment ambiguous in many settings. This has also given rise to an empirical literature studying the implications of trade liberalization on unemployment.
