The imposition of very high duties is certainly not an invention of Donald Trump: many times and long before the announcement of the “liberation day”, the United States attempted the path of customs taxation to relaunch the national economy e The results have always been inconclusive if not even catastrophic.
“We have a twentieth century president in an economy of the 21st century that wants to bring us back to the 19th century,” wrote Douglas Irwin, professor of economics of Dartmouth College.
The nineteenth century marked the golden age of duties in the United States, with an average rate that regularly touched 50 percent: an extension of a doctrine adopted since the foundation of the country, which supported the protection of the American economy during industrialization. “Accurate studies of that period suggest that the duties have contributed to protecting the internal development of industry to a certain extent,” said Keith Maskus, professor at the University of Colorado “but the two most important factors were access to international labor and the capital that flowed in the United States during that period”.
According to Christopher Meissner, professor of the University of California, in addition to these factors another “reason why in the United States the industrial sector was flourishing, was linked to the great availability of natural resources”. Carbon, oil, iron mineral, copper and timber, all essential for industry. “The industrial sector would not have been less developed if we had much lower duties,” added Meissner.
Often Donald Trump mentions the former president of the United States William McKinley as a model, the ‘master of the wave of duties approved in 1890 and is built at the years between 1870 and 1913 – the so -called’ Gilded Agè – like the period in which the United States were richer. Yet, the customs taxation wanted by McKinley did not prevent imports from continuing to grow in the years following 1890, so much so that, when in 1894 it was decided to lower it, the amount of goods that the United States purchased abroad remained below the peaks achieved in previous years.
In 1929, Harvard professor George Roorbach wrote that “from the end of the civil war, during which the United States had been under a protective system almost, if not entirely, without interruption, the import had enormously expanded and the fluctuations that occurred seem to be related mainly to factors other than the ups and downs of customs taxes”.
A year later it was the Republican President Herbert Hover to impose a close to the duties: the 1930 Smoot-Hawley Tariff Act is above all remembered “for having triggered a global commercial war and having aggravated the Great Depression”, says the Center for Strategic and International Studies.
“What generated the depression were many complicated factors, but the increase in duties is undoubtedly one of these,” said Maskus. The end of the Second World War marked the beginning of a new era in trade, defined by the ratification in 1947 by 23 countries, including the United States, of the free trade agreement Gatt who created the conditions for the development of international trade, imposing more moderate customs duties.
The momentum was maintained by the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) between the United States, Mexico and Canada, which entered into force in 1994. Next to the NAFTA, the free trade in the United States was further expanded by the creation of the World Trade Organization in 1995 and by a free trade agreement of 2004 between the United States and several Central America countries.
During his first term, Donald Trump reopened the register of duties and decided new measures against China, many of which were kept under his successor, Joe Biden. But despite these taxes, the commercial deficit of the United States with China continued to grow until 2022, when the Asian giant was hit by a brutal economic slowdown unrelated to rates. Also in that case, Maskus says, the duties on Beijing did not prevent the growth of imports from China.