Gabriel Felbermayr, Marina Steininger, Erdal Yalcin
China has emerged as a world trading power thanks to its deep economic reforms beginning in the 1980s, as well as its membership in the WTO since 2001. China’s share of global manufacturing exports surged from 2% to 16% between 1990 and 2011 (Acemoglu et al. 2016). Starting in 2018, the Trump administration introduced a series of tariffs on imports from China, triggering retaliation. The resulting US-China trade war stimulated several studies on the effects of the costs and benefits of protection (e.g. Amiti et al. 2019, Flaaen and Pierce 2019, Fajgelbaum et al. 2020, Flaaen et al. 2020).
However, the US had targeted China with special tariffs for decades and long before Donald Trump took office in 2017. The main trade policy instrument was antidumping (AD). Over 1988-2016, the average US AD duty against China more than tripled, from 45% to 148% (Figure 1). Under President Trump, it was further increased to 166%.