Who will win from the trade war? Analysis of the US–China trade war from a micro perspective

ABSTRACT Over the past two years, China and the US are going on a trade war imposing tariffs on one another’s goods and this is hurting each other’s businesses. The focus of the present paper is to analyse the costs and benefits of tariff policy changes by the two economies. A partial equilibrium model approach based on highly disaggregated data shows that when China and the US are moving rapidly towards tariff imposition, it is largely deleterious from both the economy’s perspective in terms of trade and welfare. If we compare both the economies, the losses would be considerably higher for the US than China. However, trade liberalization is clearly associated with improved trade flows in the US and additional welfare gains in China. China would gain particularly in consumer goods, industrial goods and agricultural goods whereas the US would be better off opening its consumer goods and industrial goods.