由 jpichiban 
贸易保护主义对发展中国家的经济发展具有极大的负面影响，会阻碍他们利用贸易作为增长引擎，从而加剧贫困问题。而富裕国家受贸易保护主义的影响相对较小，因为他们已经很富裕了。因此，贸易保护主义的受害者最终将是那些生活在贫困中的发展中国家的人们。
Original Title: 贸易保护主义最终将伤害谁
Summary: The World Bank’s measure of extreme poverty is an income of $2.15 a day, a level of poverty rarely seen in Western countries. At this income level, hunger or the shadow of hunger is an inescapable feature of life. It is estimated that more than half of children born into poor families are malnourished. Arguably, a small material improvement for a family living in such dire circumstances would contribute more to the overall well-being of humanity than a large gain for a comparatively lucky family.
Over the past half century, one of humanity’s greatest achievements has been the stunning progress made in reducing poverty. The share of the world’s population living below the poverty line fell from over 40 percent in 1981 to under 10 percent in 2021, with the bulk of the gains coming from two countries: China and India. The speed of poverty reduction was so rapid that the United Nations reached its goal of halving global poverty five years ahead of schedule. This improvement also brought about a more equitable global income distribution, with developing countries seeing a dramatic increase in their share of world GDP.
This progress was inseparable from international trade. In the late 1970s and mid-1980s, China and India increasingly opened their economies to the world. Many other countries have also prospered by using trade as a ladder to development, including the East Asian “Four Tigers” earlier in the 20th century.
All of this is now at risk as Western countries increasingly turn to protectionism. On both sides of the Atlantic and across both parties in Congress, the idea that trading with less wealthy countries leads to job losses and lower wages at home has become commonplace. This zero-sum thinking will severely limit the development opportunities of those whose living standards are far lower than the West’s.
International trade is tightly linked to economic growth and has long been the enemy of global poverty. Developing countries that have liberalized their trading regimes and integrated themselves into the world economy — what we call globalized countries — have performed dramatically better over the last four decades than non-globalized countries. Globalized countries have also grown faster than richer countries, allowing them to gradually close the still widening per capita income gap with the West.
Since the 1980s, China and India have been among the world’s fastest-growing economies, lifting a combined 1.1 billion people out of absolute poverty. Trade liberalization was central to both countries’ economic reforms, and the share of trade in GDP soared after liberalization. These reforms involved lowering tariffs, eliminating licensing requirements and import monopolies, and increasing exchange rate flexibility. Coupled with numerous domestic policy changes, these reforms unleashed the energy of local entrepreneurs, making it easier for companies to access foreign ideas, capital and markets. At the same time, more intense domestic competition, including competition from imported goods and newly established subsidiaries of foreign companies, weeded out inefficient firms and spurred rapid productivity growth.
This is a widely adopted blueprint. More than a third of Samsung’s smartphones are made in Vietnam. Even against a backdrop of strong nationwide economic growth, the provinces of Thai Nguyen and Bac Ninh, where smartphones are made, stand out for their significant reduction in poverty. Mexico has seen a similar pattern, with poverty rates falling more sharply and access to basic goods like food, health care and education improving more rapidly in cities where multinational corporations employ large numbers of workers.
Being connected to supply chains helps local firms prosper. They not only gain access to cutting-edge technologies but also develop valuable long-term relationships and learn how to navigate international markets. Their demand for inputs and raw materials helps create a vibrant local ecosystem. The World Bank estimates that each 1 percent increase in participation in international supply chains leads to more than a 1 percent increase in per capita income.
Trade also tends to reduce gender inequality by creating more jobs for women, who are often compensated fairly by local standards. In developing countries, export-oriented firms employ more women than firms that produce solely for the domestic market. Women account for a large share of new jobs in the service export sector. Call centers in Delhi and Mumbai alone employ around a million people, with women being particularly well represented. In Bangladesh, villages with greater links to the garment export industry — where the workforce is overwhelmingly female — have seen significant declines in child marriage and teenage pregnancies, and young girls in these villages receive an average of 1.5 more years of early education.
These achievements face significant, unnecessary risks today. Donald Trump promised to impose tariffs of 10 to 20 percent on nearly all goods imported to the United States, and 60 percent tariffs on all Chinese goods. Anti-trade sentiment among Democrats is relatively mild, but not entirely absent. The Biden administration, instead of fully reversing Trump’s earlier tariffs on steel and aluminum, recently increased them. While its landmark Inflation Reduction Act has laudable goals, it is replete with penalties on buying goods from abroad, even if those goods are cheaper and higher quality than their domestic counterparts. Globally, trade restrictions are exploding, with the number of protectionist measures implemented in 2022 more than 10 times higher than a decade earlier.
High tariffs aimed at protecting jobs in rich countries have been proved to be regressive and futile by a wealth of empirical evidence. Their effects are regressive because low-income households spend a large share of their consumption on traded goods like televisions and groceries, which tariffs make more expensive; richer consumers tend to spend more on non-traded services like healthcare and restaurant meals. And they are futile because, even if they save jobs, these are typically offset by job losses in other sectors of the economy caused by the tariffs.
The point is, the real cost of anti-trade will not be borne by rich countries, which are already rich. The strongest argument for maintaining a liberal trading order comes from those who are less fortunate.
The most under-discussed consequence of rising protectionist barriers is that it will be much harder for low-income countries to use trade as a growth engine. This will weaken the material prospects of the world’s poorest people, slowing down the pace at which generations of children escape lives of deprivation, a kind of poverty that is a fading memory in the West. The shrinkage of international trade under the onslaught of populist passions and muddled analysis would be unfortunate for rich countries. But for the vastly larger population of the rest of the world, it would be a tragedy.
Original article: https://cn.nytimes.com/opinion/20240902/tariffs-us-india-china/zh-hant/?utm_source=RSS