America’s trade deficit with China cost the United States 3.4 million jobs between 2001 and 2017, with the losses hitting all 50 states and every congressional district, according to a new study released by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI). The report notes that the trade deficit has grown by an average of almost 10 percent a year since China entered the World Trade Organization (WTO) in 2001, ballooning to $375.2 billion last year. (whole story)
Lifezette
October 24, 2018
“At the end of the day, it really to me points to the hazards of a single case study,” Ben Zipperer, an expert on the minimum wage at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute (EPI), told the Times after writing a blog post critical of the University of Washington analyses. (In defense of the work, Jacob Vigdor, a UW economist, argued the two studies were not wholly incompatible and stressed the complexity of the issues: “What we can’t tell from our data is whether a lot of people are trying to find work and not finding anyone willing to hire them, or whether there just aren’t as many people making the effort,” he told the paper.)
Vice News
October 24, 2018
A critique published Monday by the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute says problems with the first study haven’t been fixed, and thus the new study overstates the reduction in new entrants to Seattle’s labor market. Since it defines “new entrant” as someone making less than $15 an hour, the study would count someone who got hired at $16 or $17 an hour as a lost job instead of a better one.
CNN
October 24, 2018
California has lost more jobs to China than any other state since 2001, fueled by Silicon Valley outsourcing and the continued shrinking of Southern California’s apparel industry, according to a report released Tuesday by a Washington, D.C., think tank. Some 562,000 jobs were displaced in the Golden State, the equivalent of a 3.34% share of California’s total employment of 16.8 million jobs in 2017, the Economic Policy Institute concluded. (whole story)
Los Angeles Times
October 24, 2018
President Trump’s trade war with China won’t bring back the jobs lost from the trade deficit with China, according to Robert Scott, a senior economist at the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute, whose work Trump cited on the campaign trail and during his presidency. (whole story, chart included)
Axios
October 24, 2018
TRADE TROUBLES: The trade deficit that has “ballooned” since China joined the World Trade Organization has cost 3.4 million US jobs from 2001 to 2017, hitting the manufacturing sector the hardest, according to a new report from the left-leaning Economic Policy Institute. “Between 2001 and 2011 alone , growing trade deficits with China reduced the incomes of directly impacted workers by $37 billion per year, and in 2011 alone, growing competition with imports from China and other low wage-countries reduced the wages of all U.S. non-college graduates by a total of $180 billion,” according to the report. Economists Robert E. Scott and Zane Mokhiber say that because imports from China have soared, while exports to China have increased at a slower pace, the US is losing jobs and missing opportunities to add them in manufacturing. “Some regions are devastated by layoffs and factory closings while others are surviving but not growing the way they could be if new factories were opening and existing plants were hiring more workers,” they write. “This slowdown in manufacturing job generation is also contributing to stagnating wages of typical workers and widening inequality.” Read the report here.
Politico Pro
October 24, 2018
Meanwhile, the left-leaning Economics Policy Institute in Washington is issuing a report Tuesday that paints a dim picture of the impact of the U.S. trade deficit with China on American jobs, particularly in New York. The trade deficit, now more than $260 billion, cost the U.S. 3.4 million jobs between 2001 when China entered the World Trade Organization, and 2017. Three quarters of the job losses were in manufacturing, the report concluded. (Rob and EPI cited throughout)
Times Union
October 24, 2018
Critics of the UW team’s methodology point out that there are other forces driving differences between labor markets in Seattle and the rest of Washington besides the minimum-wage increases during the study period — namely, the rapid growth of the city and rising costs for just about everything. “In reality, Seattle’s economic boom simply meant that low-wage jobs were converted into higher-wage jobs,” not that there are fewer job opportunities, wrote Ben Zipperer, an economist at the Economic Policy Institute, which focuses on the impacts on low- and middle-income people of a broad range of policies. He pointed out other shortcomings, including the study’s omission of workers at businesses with more than one location, such as chain restaurants, because of limitations in the state employment data the UW used.
The Seattle Times
October 24, 2018
In a blog for the Economic Policy Institute on Monday, Zipperer said that he thinks even the new study has flaws:
By comparing workers in Seattle with workers elsewhere in Washington state, the study incorrectly assumes that the low-wage labor market in Seattle would have grown like other areas in Washington, were it not for the city’s 2015-2016 minimum wage increases. This comparison is unreasonable because, as other researchers have demonstrated (Dube 2017, Rothstein and Schanzenbach 2017, Zipperer and Schmitt 2017), Seattle experienced much faster wage gains for reasons that had nothing to do with the minimum wage. Indeed, the authors of the new study find that Seattle had faster wage growth and diverged from other regions prior to the city’s minimum wage increases.
Splinter News
October 24, 2018
However, some experts were critical of the study, saying some of its methodology and assumptions were problematic. For example, the Seattle study excludes newly entering workers employed by chain businesses, which account for more than a third of low-wage employment in Washington State, which officials at the Economic Policy Institute said was a critical omission. ‘At the same time, if you believe the findings of the study for these workers who already have jobs at the time of the minimum wage increase, all of them seem to be benefitting,’ EPI Economist Ben Zipperer told DailyMail.com. ‘Even the low-hours group (of workers) are making the same amount of money but working fewer hours.’
The Daily Mail
October 24, 2018