The paper “Trade Protection Along Supply Chains” of Aksel Erbahar, Assistant Professor at Erasmus School of Economics, and his co-authors, was presented to the US International Trade Commission.

In the paper, Erbahar and his co-authors combined detailed information on US antidumping (AD) duties with US input-output data to study the effects of trade protection against China along supply chains. They find that AD duties have a negative impact on US jobs as they reduce employment growth in downstream industries. Their research provides important implications regarding the ongoing policy debate about the use of protectionist measures against China in the US and other countries.

‘It is the quasi-judicial agency, along with the Department of Commerce, in the US that decides whether to implement trade protection for certain industries’, Erbahar says. ‘We basically explained to them that their decisions are influenced by politics. Surprisingly, they were not defensive and rather intrigued.’