Trade with China actually boosts US employment, new studies find
- Most job losses between 2000 and 2014 were limited to American manufacturing sector and offset by gains in other fields, says researcher
- Findings come as US government seeks public comment on Trump-era trade tariffs in highly charged political landscape
American trade with China has not proved pivotal to the loss of US jobs and in fact such engagement boosts employment overall, according to new studies highlighted by an influential Washington-based think tank and top American university on Friday.
Defying conventional thinking, the research highlighted by the Centre for Strategic and International Studies’ Trustee Chair in Chinese Business and Economics and the Stanford Centre on China’s Economy and Institutions concluded the US had experienced “no net employment loss due to trade with China”.
Instead, trade between the world’s two leading economies resulted in “wage increases for 75 per cent of American workers” between 2000 and 2014, said Wang Zhi of George Mason University, whose research the studies cited.
Wang explained that most job losses came in the “US heartland” where population density was relatively low.
Losses were confined to the manufacturing sector, which makes up a small portion of the US labour market, and these were offset by gains in non-manufacturing sectors, the researcher added.