FACT: U.S. imports from Russia are up 30% this year, likely to hit $5 billion.

THE NUMBERS: U.S. fertilizer imports,
January – July 2025* –

* U.S. International Trade Commission Dataweb

WHAT THEY MEAN: 

Secretary of State Marco Rubio used a September 23 NBC appearance to term it “absurd” that some EU countries are still buying Russian energy. As the EU develops a new set of sanctions on Russian use of cryptocurrency, “shadow fleet” oil transport, and banking, the Trump administration has cited these purchases to avoid new sanctions on Russia itself. A day before Rubio’s appearance, though, Politico trade reporter Doug Palmer published a startling find about the United States’ trade with Russia:

“Russia’s fertilizer exports to the United States are rebounding in 2025 after falling in 2023 and 2024, according to Commerce Department data. The data also shows that U.S. imports of Russian enriched uranium and platinum are on their way to higher levels this year. In total, imports from Russia are up nearly 30 percent from 2024, and could reach close to $5 billion by the end of the year.”

Not only have U.S. imports from Russia jumped, but the Russian fertilizer and  specialty metals — mainly platinum-group metals palladium and rhodium, used in catalytic converters, along with the uranium — still arrive duty-free despite the tariffs the Trump administration has imposed on similar goods from allies and other suppliers. Here’s the background:

Before the war in 2021, American purchases from Russia looked like this:

Two weeks after Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine in February 2022, the Biden administration banned Russian energy, diamonds, seafood (mainly Arctic crab), and luxury goods. As they fell to zero, American imports of Russian goods accordingly dropped by 90%, from the $29.7 billion of 2021 to $3.0 billion in 2024. Biden’s team left a couple of holes, though, as it didn’t ban fertilizer or specialty metals. The EU’s Russian imports are down from $174 billion in 2021 to $36 billion.

A week later, Congress withdrew Russia’s ‘Most Favored Nation’ tariff status. Legally, this shifts tariff rates from the generally low ones of the normal, Congressionally authorized tariff schedule to those set in the 1930 “Smoot-Hawley” tariff bill. For most countries, this would be a very big hit, shriveling up the trade that the Biden administration hadn’t already banned. But as we noted at the time, Russia was an unusual exception. The Congressional tariff-writers in 1930 wanted high rates on finished manufactured goods and farm products, but low ones or zero on natural resources and other factory and farm inputs. In practice, that’s mostly what Russia was selling: the ‘non-MFN’ tariffs on fertilizer (see Column 2 here) are all zero, as are those on uranium, palladium, and rhodium. So withdrawal of MFN status didn’t matter for these things.

The Trump administration’s April tariff decrees, meanwhile, exempted Russian goods on the unconvincing grounds that the U.S. already sanctions Russia in other ways. In practice, that means leaving Russian fertilizer and metals duty-free. Mr. Trump’s July 31 decree then taxed identical stuff from other sources at 10% and up: 10% on fertilizer from Saudi Arabia or Qatar, and 15% if it’s from Nigeria, Israel, or Trinidad; 30% on South African palladium and rhodium. (Canadian fertilizer and potash remain duty-free for now under the bruised-but-still-in-force “U.S.-Mexico-Canada Agreement”.) So Russia is now picking up market share at their expense. In sum, as Palmer notes, imports from Russia are up about 30% this year and are likely accelerating.

Across the Atlantic, meanwhile, the EU — after some strong persuasion of the populist semidemocrats in Hungary and Slovakia, the main European buyers of Russian oil and gas — is supposed to stop buying Russian energy altogether by the end of 2027. Mr. Rubio isn’t wrong to urge them to stop sooner, though it’s hard to see why that means the U.S. should hold back on financial and shipping sanctions. And with U.S. imports of Russian fertilizer and metals jumping this year, Europeans aren’t alone in earning adjectives like “absurd.”

FURTHER READING

PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:

• Defend the Constitution and oppose rule by decree;
• Connect tariff policy to growth, work, prices and family budgets, and living standards;
• Stand by America’s neighbors and allies;
• Offer a positive alternative.

Radio Free Europe/Radio Liberty on new EU sanctions proposals.

On NBC last month, Sec. Rubio’s strong words for European buyers of Russian energy.

… and a day earlier, Palmer reports for Politico Pro (subs. req.) on rising U.S. fertilizer and metal imports from Russia.

Policy: 

The Biden administration’s bans on energy, seafood, diamonds, and luxuries.

The EU’s current schedule for ending Russian energy buying.

Data:

Census’ topline summary of U.S.-Russia trade by month.

Finland-based Centre for Research on Energy and Clean Air tracks purchasing of Russian energy by country; also see their aggregate totals.

The U.S. Energy Information Agency on U.S. energy production, importing, exporting, and use.

And the U.S. Geological Survey on platinum-group metal uses, reserves, production, and trade.

PPI perspectives:

PPI’s New Ukraine Project, led by Kyiv-based Tamar Jacoby, reports on Ukrainian economic reform, the mood at the front, military industry growth, and more.

Energy and Climate Policy Director Elan Sykes (2023) on American liquefied natural gas as a replacement for European purchases of Russian energy.

And our Trade Fact reminder: Isolationism and appeasement are dangerous.

ABOUT ED

Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.

Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.

Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

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FACT: Trump administration tariffs are failing to achieve their goals.

THE NUMBERS: Manufacturing share of U.S. GDP:

WHAT THEY MEAN: 

What is the Trump administration trying to do? Rep. Brendan Boyle (D-Pa.)’s adept questioning of U.S. Trade Representative Jamieson Greer at April’s House Ways and Means Committee hearing (2:30:33) extracted a definition and two measurable goals:

“The deficit [i.e. trade balance] needs to go in the right direction. Manufacturing as a share of GDP needs to go in the right direction.” 

Amb. Greer’s two metrics have some pretty serious flaws as definitions of “success.” (See below in “Further Reading” for a brief critique.) But in contrast to vague administration slogans like “production society” and “new golden age,” they’re actual things official stats regularly measure. So, eight months since Mr. Trump’s tariff binge started, how do they look?

1. The manufacturing share of U.S. GDP is smaller: The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis does the official ‘GDP by Industry’ estimate. Its most recent release, out last Thursday, puts the manufacturing share of U.S. GDP at 9.4% this year, down from 9.8% in 2024.

2. The U.S. trade deficit is bigger (but volatile): The Census Bureau’s monthly tallies of U.S. trade flows show a goods-trade deficit of $840 billion so far this year (from January to July), 23% larger than the $682 billion they report for January-July 2024. Alternatively, (a) for manufacturing specifically, this year’s $800 billion deficit outdoes last year’s $655 billion, and (b) the larger goods/services balance at $654 billion is up about 30%n from last year’s $500 billion.

Cautionary note on trade balance, though: The higher 2025 deficit reflects in part a surge of imports in January, February, and March, as worried businesses pushed to get products in and pile up inventories before tariffs went up. Since May, deficits have dropped a bit. Census’ most recent monthly total was $103.9 billion in July, equal (with rounding) to the $104.4 billion in July 2024. This year’s total is pretty certain to be bigger than last year’s, and last July’s summer tax bill will probably push up trade deficits next year (again, see below). But there’s some room for uncertainty.

In sum: So, Amb. Greer’s metrics don’t look very good. In the months since his exchange with Rep. Boyle, both — especially the manufacturing/GDP share — have gone in a pretty clear direction. It’s not the one the administration probably expected or wanted.  In common parlance, they seem to be going south.

FURTHER READING

PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:

• Defend the Constitution and oppose rule by decree;
• Connect tariff policy to growth, work, prices and family budgets, and living standards;
• Stand by America’s neighbors and allies;
• Offer a positive alternative.

Amb. Greer at the April Ways and Means Committee hearing; exchange on “success” defined by changes in trade balance and the manufacturing share of GDP at 2:20:33. The site also has prepared text and a full hearing video.

… or for a lengthier discussion, see Amb. Greer’s “Reindustrialize America” remarks.

Check the data:

The Bureau of Economic Analysis’ GDP by Industry calculations, updated last Thursday for the first half of 2025.

Census’ most recent monthly FT-900 trade release, with exports, imports, and balances generally, by product type, and by country. Also from Census, see –

… the FT-900 archives back to 1991.

… and a one-page summary of U.S. imports, exports, and trade balances from 1960 to 2024.

    Manufacturing share – 

Why would tariffs bring down the manufacturing share of GDP? Mainly because manufacturers buy lots of natural resources, capital goods like industrial machinery, inputs like paint and metal, and components and parts from brake-pads to semiconductor chips, light bulbs, and cloth. Taxing these things through the tariff system makes manufacturing here more expensive. Here’s an example, from an appeal filed to the Commerce Department in June by the National Aerosol Association (a trade group representing makers of whipped-cream canisters, perfume spritzers, etc):

“[B]oth the producers and the fillers of metal aerosol packages in the United States face increased prices for their key inputs as a result of the Section 232 tariffs, as tinplate steel, laminate steel, aluminum, and empty aerosol containers made from those metals are all subject to Section 232 tariffs. As a result, these U.S. industries are currently operating at a material disadvantage compared to foreign producers of empty and filled metal aerosol products, none of which face increased prices associated with Section 232 steel and aluminum tariffs.”

As PPI’s Gresser noted last week, the Commerce Department responded in August with a decree declaring that condensed milk and cream are made of metal. Perfume, windshield de-icing fluid, balance beams, propane, and much else too. In effect, the DoC’s solution is not to make “manufacturing in America” less expensive, but to make the relevant goods more expensive for families, too. The likely effect is that they’ll buy less.

And perspective:

Trade balance and the GDP share held by manufacturers can suggest things. But especially when taken alone, they aren’t very reliable gauges of trade policy success specifically, or economic health in general. Some background on both –

1. Manufacturing share of GDP: This is “the size of manufacturing relative to other parts of the economy,” not “how strong is the manufacturing sector.” This ratio could fall during a factory boom if other large parts of the economy — say homebuilding, the digital economy, retail sales – grew even faster. That in fact happened in the late 1990s. Likewise, the “manufacturing share of GDP” could rise in a terrible year, despite lots of factory closures and job loss, if housing and banks crashed even harder. This hasn’t happened recently, but 2009 and 2010 came close.

2. Trade balance: By economic math, the national trade balance equals the gap between national savings and national investment rates. Changes in these “macro” figures change the balance, and trade policy in the sense of agreements, rules, and tariff rates typically has little impact on them.  The government’s largest influence on these figures is the fiscal deficit, which is part of the national savings rate. Deficits typically rise after large tax-cut bills — as in the early 1980s, the early 2000s, and the first Trump administration — and trade deficits typically follow it up.

Household savings and business investment levels are even stronger influences than government fiscal balance. Thus, trade deficits tend to rise in boom years (when investment booms and families spend) and fall in recessions (when investment crashes and consumers pull back). For example, in 2009 — this century’s worst year for the U.S. economy generally, for job loss, and for manufacturing specifically — the U.S. trade deficit fell by almost half, from $712 billion to $395 billion or from 5.0% to 2.9% of GDP. No one cheered.

What might be better definitions of success? The typical person would probably think economic policy in generally should try to bring down the cost of living, create growth, and provide more job opportunities, and trade policy should help. It takes work to sift out the effect of trade policy on these things from all the other things that go on in an economy, but that’s what academic economists, the U.S. International Trade Commission, etc., are for.

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FACT: Americans are buying 22 tons of Ukrainian honey daily.

THE NUMBERS: Vessel calls at three Ukrainian Black Sea ports —

Lloyd’s List, Feb. 2025. The ports are Odesa, Chornomorsk, and Yuzhni.

WHAT THEY MEAN: 

A cautious International Monetary Fund mid-year evaluation of Ukraine’s economic outlook balances risk and ‘resilience’ this June:

“Russia’s war continues to take a devastating social and economic toll on Ukraine. Nevertheless, macroeconomic stability has been preserved through skillful policymaking as well as substantial external support. The economy has remained resilient, but the war is weighing on the outlook, with growth tempered by labor market strains and damage to energy infrastructure. Risks to the outlook remain exceptionally high and contingency planning is key to enable appropriate policy action should risks materialize.”

The Fund’s bottom-line April projection was 2.0% GDP growth this year; the June outlook is a slightly brighter “2 to 3 percent.” This is by no means a boom, and a point below Poland’s 3.2%; but it’s also noticeably above the Fund’s 1.5% guess for Russia, the 1.3% and 1.4% for neighboring Hungary and Slovakia, and also the 1.8% for the United States.

Ukrainian-economy background on this, shifting from the Fund’s “macro” world of growth, employment rates, and fiscal balances to the “micro” world of defense factories, seaports, and farm exports.

Industry: Ukraine’s industrial economy is evolving rapidly, as the war helps create a high-tech military industry and to an extent diminishes the centrality of the large “oligarchy” iron, steel, and grain industries Ukraine inherited from the Soviet era.  PPI’s Kyiv-based New Ukraine Project Director Tamar Jacoby explains:

“The 2022 invasion reinvigorated a domestic defense industry that had atrophied beyond recognition since Soviet times. Thousands of IT technicians and engineers dropped whatever they were doing in peacetime to join the defense sector or enlist in the army and provide technical support on the front line. Today, some 700 defense manufacturers employ more than 300,000 technicians and sustain scores of other companies making weapons components and dual-use products.”

These are mostly start-up businesses — state-owned firms accounted for 80% of defense production in 2022, and now less than 30% — and they produce quite a lot. Per Jacoby, since 2022, Ukraine has multiplied its artillery-shell production about 25-fold, and upped drone production from fewer than 2,500 drones to a likely 4.5 million this year. The economic effect is to enlarge Ukraine’s world of small tech-oriented manufacturing, and (relatively) shift GDP away from large state-owned heavy industry plants. On the military side, it has underwritten a stunning and continuing naval success: without a single capital ship of its own, Ukraine used home-designed drones to sink a third of the Russian Black Sea Fleet’s 74 ships by the end of 2023 and has forced the rest to shelter out of range in the east ever since.

Farm Exports and Rural Economy: This naval victory in turn reopened Ukraine’s main Black Sea trade route by the end of 2023. The Lloyd’s List ship arrival figures, showing vessel calls quadrupling in 2024, mean both steady flows of consumer goods into Ukraine and export income for industrial and rural communities.

Early that year, we cited honey as a kind of bellwether. This is a traditional Ukrainian standard: UN Food and Agriculture Organization stats found prewar Ukraine the world’s fourth-largest honey producer, with 200,000 professional beekeepers plus another 200,000 part-timers and hobbyists, 2.3 million bee colonies, and about 70,000 tons of honey produced for sale annually. (For context, the U.S. last year had about 120,000 professional and part-time beekeepers. They managed 2.6 million colonies and produced 69,500 tons of honey.) By the end of 2024, Americans had bought a record 12,300 tons of Ukrainian honey. This year’s total will probably be a bit lower, but still above the pre-war averages:

Estimates for 2025 based on January – July U.S. Census totals.

Back to Macro: The honey figures — and those for iron and sunflower oil are similar — illustrate some of the IMF’s “resilience” in practice. Export income is flowing to Ukraine’s beekeepers. The manufacturing, packaging, and transport services needed to collect honey and package it for sale abroad work, and financial systems likewise. And busy seaports are supporting large-scale commodity trade, with cargo flows doubling the levels of 2022 and 2023.

This doesn’t negate the high risks the IMF mentions, nor the Ukrainian government’s challenges in covering wartime budgets. But it does show Ukraine’s economy holding up well, from soldiers at the front to naval specialists keeping the Russian fleet in port, the creativity and rapid growth of drone-design labs and factories, to beekeepers and sunflower farmers on the land.

FURTHER READING

From PPI:

Kyiv-based Tamar Jacoby directs PPI’s New Ukraine Project, with in-depth research and regular reporting on Ukrainian daily life, the mood at the front, industrial evolution, anti-corruption programs, and more. Recent samples:

• Ukraine’s new military industry.
• Mr. Trump’s Alaska fiasco.
• At the front in March.

And our February Trade Fact on the Ukrainian cause, the Trump administration and Vladimir Putin, and the principles underlying successful American foreign policy: Isolationism and appeasement are dangerous.

Ukraine economy:

From the International Monetary Fund, basic Ukraine-economy stats and the mid-year 2025 evaluation.

Lloyd’s List tallies ship arrivals at Odesa, Chornomorsk, and Yuzhnyi.

Politico/EU reports on Ukrainian farming in wartime, oligarchs v. startups, and economic reform.

EU statisticians track Ukraine-European trade flows.

And Germany’s Kiel Institute monitors U.S., European, UK, and other aid programs.

Some “sweetness and light”:

Our March 2024 look at Ukrainian beekeeping, honey, the war, and Black Sea trade.

Agricultural specialist and translator Alisa Koverda explains Ukraine’s beekeeping culture and its wartime adaptation in 2022.

The UN’s Food and Agricultural Organization has worldwide data, and USDA has a U.S. closeup.

… and Фундація Жінок Пасічниць (Fundatsiya Zhinok Pasichnish for non-Cyrillic readers; translated, Foundation of Women Beekeepers), with honey contacts and beekeeping tips.

And last:

Special note: We’re proud to note that this Trade Fact is the 200th in our revived series. We are grateful to PPI’s generous supporters for their commitment to our values and work, and we thank friends and readers in the U.S. and worldwide for your ideas, reactions, and occasional critiques.

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FACT: The U.S. African and Haitian trade preference programs end this month.

THE NUMBERS: U.S. imports 2024 –

WHAT THEY MEAN: 

Lesotho’s Government Gazette typically announces pretty mundane things: Cabinet appointments, revisions of traffic regulations, annual financial statements, etc. The Gazette’s Bulletin #57, out on July 7 and labeled “Extraordinary,” is different:

“Pursuant to section 3 of the Disaster Management Act, 1997, and acting on the advice of the Board through the Minister in the Prime Minister’s Office, I, Nthomeng Majara, Acting Prime Minister of Lesotho, declare a state of disaster on socio-economic effects on high rates of youth unemployment and job losses in Lesotho which threaten the livelihood of the people of Lesotho. This declaration shall be for a period of two years with effect from the date of publication in the Gazette to the 30th of June, 2027.”

When Mr. Majara uses the term “disaster,” he isn’t exaggerating.

As a point of departure, since 1974, the U.S. has provided support for small and low-income countries through an array of “trade preference” programs (a technical term meaning “U.S. law waiving tariffs”). Two of these programs, the “African Growth and Opportunity Act” (“AGOA” in common usage) and “HOPE/HELP”, date to the early 2000s and have used clothing tariff waivers to underwrite and growth in Haiti and a number of African countries — Kenya, Madagascar, Tanzania, Ghana, as well as Lesotho and South Africa — for a generation.

Their last renewal and update came in 2015. It gave them a ten-year lifespan, which runs out on September 30, 2025. So, absent an urgent Congressional action, both stop at the end of this month. Some background on their impact, and the likely consequences:

Lesotho is a small, landlocked country of two million people in southern Africa. As we pointed out some months ago, its 33 garment companies are especially successful AGOA users, and are Lesotho’s largest sources of wage-paying jobs. (Top product: four million pairs of blue jeans.) Employment isn’t the industry’s only value: Southern Africa is the region hit hardest by the HIV/AIDS pandemic, Lesotho has the world’s second-highest HIV-positive rate at 19.3% of adults, and garment factories have joined the American PEPFAR program as large-scale providers of HIV treatment and education.

Haiti is as “preference-reliant” as Lesotho, shipping 47,500 tons of garments to American shops each year via Miami, topped by 195 million cotton T-shirts. Last year’s receipts were just under $600 million.  This industry is “resilient” in policy jargon.  Having weathered the 2007 Port-au-Prince earthquake — owing to factories built to international standards, on-site electricity generators, and dedicated transport services for workers — and though eroded by the past three years’ chaotic Port-au-Prince politics, it employed 24,850 hourly-wage workers at the end of July.

In practical terms, the end of these programs means that Lesotho’s jeans — now duty-free — will get both a 16.6% MFN tariff and the Trump administration’s 15% “reciprocal” tariff. That is, a 31.6% tax by Columbus Day as against none at all this week. Haiti’s duty-free T-shirts will get a 16.5% MFN rate and a new 10% “reciprocal” rate, for an overall 26.5% penalty. And though recitations of tariff rates can make for dry reading, again: when Mr. Majara uses the Government Gazette to announce a disaster, he isn’t exaggerating.

Lesotho’s clothing orders started drying up in the summer, and the garment economy is starting to collapse. Two first-hand accounts by American journalists from August illustrate the consequences:

National Public Radio: “Maqajela Hlaatsane, 54, has been working in Maseru’s garment industry for decades — a job that’s allowed her to raise her children on her own. Like many here she’s a single mother who has been empowered by joining the workforce. Now she’s unemployed and hungry, she says, pointing to the water bottle she carries around drinking to try to trick herself into feeling full. What food she has she’s saving for her family. ‘I’m here looking for a job,’ she says, standing on the street in the garment district where the smell of sewage fills the air. ‘My family can’t survive on water alone.’ Like many searching for work, she’s unclear why the U.S. imposed such massive tariffs on her desperately poor country, but they all keep repeating one name: ‘Trump, Trump, Trump.’”

NYT (subs. req.): “In ordinary times, Maseru’s residents greet the month’s end with an exhale, collecting their salaries and sometimes treating themselves to a little splurge. The Lapeng Bar and Restaurant in downtown Maseru usually draws crowds indulging in Maluti Premium Lager and tripe stew. But the end of July had been eliciting dread. Dread that their children might not be allowed to attend school next week, without enough money to pay their fees. And that they’ll fall further behind on bills. And that they’ll need to rely on family and friends to purchase food so they can eat more than once a day. ‘We are just hoping the Messiah can come,’ said Solong Senohe, the secretary general of Unite, a Lesotho textile worker’s union. For many people, like Neo Makhera, it was already too late for divine intervention. On Tuesday afternoon she huddled around a fire at the side of a road, selling loose cigarettes and vegetables. She’s been doing this, and offering to wash her neighbors’ laundry, since April when she lost her job sewing Reebok T-shirts and shorts.”

Last thought: In the world of American trade flows, the AGOA and HOPE/HELP numbers are pretty small. Last year’s $1.76 billion worth of African- and Haitian-stitched clothes made up about 2% of America’s annual clothing imports, and less than 0.1% of last year’s $3.3 trillion in imports. Unless you’re looking, you might not notice when they lapse.  But in the economies of Haiti, Lesotho, and other African AGOA beneficiary countries, they’re very large. And this unfolding human disaster can still be arrested.

The two weeks left before the expiration date aren’t a long time — but they are still enough for Congress to act before the clocks run down.

FURTHER READING

PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:

• Defend the Constitution and oppose rule by decree;
• Connect tariff policy to growth, work, prices and family budgets, and living standards;
• Stand by America’s neighbors and allies;
• Offer a positive alternative.

News from Lesotho:

Acting PM Majara announces a national disaster.

… and the Lesotho Times reports.

On-the-ground reporting from the New York Times and National Public Radio.

And the Lesotho Embassy in DC.

And from Kenya:

Lesotho is far from alone in its alarm.  Here for example is a headline from The Star in Nairobi: “Mass Job Loss Looms as Curtains Drawn on AGOA Pact.”

Program background:

The U.S. Trade Representative Office’s AGOA page.

And the International Labor Organization reports on Haitian garment workers.

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FACT: Humanity is ‘aging’ three months each year.

THE NUMBERS: Median age,* worldwide –

* Our World in Data
 

WHAT THEY MEAN: 

We last looked at the graying world in the fall of 2023. Here’s a reprise, with two more years of data:

Until the 19th century, life expectancy at birth was about 30, and a 25-year-old expected (on average) to live to 50. One rare exception who made it to the tenth decade — 90-year-old Usama ibn Munqidh, a Syrian aristocrat living in retirement at Saladin’s court in 1185 — found the old age experience a dismaying surprise. In his youth, he would happily ride off on weekends to spear a few Crusaders or some charismatic megafauna; now he’s worn out by a few hours with a calligraphy pen:

When I wake up I feel like a mountain is on top of me
When I walk, it’s like wearing chains
I creep around with a cane in my hand …
My hand struggles to hold up a pen, when it once
Broke spears in the hearts of lions.

Nobody’s surprised now. The elderly demographic is the world’s fastest-growing, adding 15 million octo- and nonagenarians, plus half a million over 100, since 2020. Birth rates, meanwhile, have dropped by half in the last 50 years. So humanity is steadily aging. Per the Our World in Data table, the world’s “median age” — that is, the age of the person exactly in the middle — rises about three months a year. At 30 years and a month as of 2022, it’s now about to hit 31. (Meaning that this actual “median person” is a “millennial” born early in 1995.) By the next U.S. presidential election, it will likely hit 32. A little detail, beginning with a sample list of median ages by country –

Pulling back a bit, Africa is the world’s “youngest” region, with a median age just above 19. Europe is the “oldest” at nearly 43, and Latin America is in the middle at 32. Asia is mixed: the South Asian tier is relatively youthful (Pakistan at 21, India 29, Sri Lanka 33); ASEAN skews a bit older, from the 26 in Cambodia and the Philippines to 41 in Thailand; Hong Kong, Taiwan, and Korea join Japan and Korea on the world’s aging frontier. China is a notch younger but aging fast: the median Chinese out-aged his or her median-American counterpart in 2019, turned 40 this year, and is now a year and a half older than the median American.

Youngest: The world’s youthful extreme is in the Central African Republic, where the 14.5-year-old median person is possibly a lycee sophomore (or more likely, in a 56% rural country, a farm kid pondering a move to the city). Niger, Somalia, Mali, Chad, and the Democratic Republic of Congo are one grade older, all somewhere between 15 and 16.

Most typical: The countries most closely representing this year’s world demographics, each with a median age between 30 and 31, are Bhutan, Indonesia, Malaysia, and Panama.

“Oldest”: Japan, whose median age will likely cross 50 this winter (after reaching 30 in 1977, and 40 in 1998), is furthest out on the gray frontier.* Italy is next at 48, followed by Hong Kong and Portugal at 47, with Korea, Bosnia, and Germany.

So: Over the 2020s and 2023s, expect production and consumer booms in India, Africa, and parts of the Middle East. Americans, and the U.S.’ neighbors north and south, will be aging. And Europeans and East Asians, having long since put down their spears and growing tired as they push around the modern equivalents of calligraphy pens, can look forward to labor shortages, lower growth rates, and politics increasingly dominated by arguments over how to pay for health and pensions. Maybe not very inspiring but still, as ibn M. might agree, better than any currently realistic alternative.

* Counting countries with populations above 100,000. The Vatican, with about 800 people, is technically the oldest country, with its various Cardinals, secretaries, and Swiss Guards at a median age of about 57.

FURTHER READING

 PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:

• Defend the Constitution and oppose rule by decree;
• Connect tariff policy to growth, work, prices and family budgets, and living standards;
• Stand by America’s neighbors and allies;
• Offer a positive alternative

Aging:

Our World in Data’s interactive table of median ages by country, region, income group, etc., from 1950 to the present with projections to 2100.

The CIA’s World Factbook ranks countries by life expectancy.

And Usama ibn Munqidh has perspective on old age and lots more — medieval battle tactics, poetry and calligraphy advice, Crusaders’ odd gender habits and loony trial-by-ordeal legal theories, and the mighty Saladin.

Countries:

Indonesia, at 240 million people, joins Malaysia, Panama, and Bhutan at the demographic median. Stat-portrait here.

Japan will be the first country (again, setting aside the Vatican and a couple of other micro-states) to pass 50.  Through the lens of Nippon Steel’s eventually successful bid to purchase U.S. Steel, Senior Fellow Yuka Hayashi explains how this is playing out in Japanese industry and foreign direct investment.

And only in the Central African Republic are most people 14 years or younger.

And at home:

As America’s population approaches the 40-year median Japan reached in 1998, PPI’s Ben Ritz and Nate Morris look at Social Security at 90, with demographics, financing, and policy ideas.

… and the broader PPI Budget Blueprint sets out tax, health, retirement, interest, and other reforms to bring down long-term debt, stabilize retirement and health programs, free up money for discretionary spending, and ensure “fiscal democracy” for the next generation.

ABOUT ED

Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.

Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.

Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

Read the full email and sign up for the Trade Fact of the Week.

FACT: Las Vegas unemployment is up 12% this summer.

THE NUMBERS: Canadians returning home from U.S. visits by car –

* StatCanada

WHAT THEY MEAN: 

FURTHER READING

PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:

• Defend the Constitution and oppose rule by decree;
• Connect tariff policy to growth, work, prices and family budgets, and living standards;
• Stand by America’s neighbors and allies;
• Offer a positive alternative.

In better times:

Then-Pres. Reagan signs the U.S.-Canada Free Trade Agreement, September 1988.

PM Mulroney pitches the idea to anxious Canadians, December 1987.

… and from the Canadian Embassy, U.S.-Canada state-by-state trade data.

Now:

The Trump administration’s Feb. 1 emergency decree claims a northern-border “emergency.”

… CBP drug-seizure stats don’t show one.

Up north:

PM Mark Carney assesses in April …

… responds to August 1 tariff threats: preserve USMCA, diversify Canada’s options, reform at home.

… and speculates on a Canada-EU future.

And the Pew Center polls Canadians on views of President Biden, Mr. Trump, and the United States.

Nevada focus:

StatCanada counts shrinking numbers of tourists returning home.

… Air Canada likewise.

UNLV’s Center for Business and Economic Research has research and data updates on Las Vegas, Clark County, and Nevada.

Las Vegas hotels and casinos gloomily report falling occupancy and revenue.

… and the Las Vegas Review-Journal concurs, finding the city’s employment rate the second-highest in the U.S. this year.

Hawaii’s tourist authority has a similar but not quite as bleak outlook.

ABOUT ED

Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.

Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.

Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

Read the full email and sign up for the Trade Fact of the Week.

FACT: ‘Export control’ decisions ought to be made on ‘national security’ grounds, and the government shouldn’t earn money from approving sales.

THE NUMBERS: Export licenses granted for military-related technologies –

WHAT THEY MEAN: 

• Understand the state of technology in fields as different as microbiology, artificial intelligence, materials science, avionics, and ballistics, whether in the United States or elsewhere.
• Make reasonable estimates of the effect export limits would have on potential adversaries. (Slow them down? Push them into developing their own technologies independent of U.S. input? Both at the same time?)
• Make reasonable estimates of the impact lost export revenue would have on American research, development, and future technological leadership.
• Then, integrate these to reach the best available judgment on the national security merits of a specific application to export one of the listed products.

FACT: Main likely impacts of Trump administration trade ‘deals’:
higher prices, uncertain export and investment benefits, policy instability.

THE NUMBERS: Extra tariff burden, February to mid-July 2025 –

* Customs and Border Protection summary, through July 13th .

WHAT THEY MEAN: 

Though the administration has announced lots of July’s trade “deals” — the European Union, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, Thailand, Cambodia, Malaysia, Indonesia, the Philippines, Pakistan, Bangladesh — it hasn’t posted any actual agreement texts. In only one case (Indonesia) has published a “Joint Statement” with an agreed description of the contents. So lots about them is uncertain. With that noted, though, the arrangements appear to have three main features: higher prices for Americans, some commitments for exporters/intellectual property holders/investment seekers; and more future policy instability. More details and initial reactions to each –

1. Higher prices: First, bluntly put, most Americans will lose from these “deals.” Their common feature is a very high tariff, imposed by decree rather than legislation, on goods bought from abroad. Vietnamese-made goods like shoes and consumer electronics, for example, will get a 20% tax. So will pretty much everything from Taiwan and Bangladesh. Japanese and Korean products — cars, boats, matcha, MRI machines — get a modestly lower 15%, while things from the Philippines, Thailand, Cambodia, Indonesia, and Pakistan are at 19%. All are loaded on top of the regular, Congressionally authorized “MFN” tariff system. (“MFN,” the acronym for “most favored nation,” the term of art for the standard non-discriminatory approach to tariff rates.) The EU “deal” is somewhat different, imposing a 15% fee which replaces rather than being added to the regular MFN tariff rates. (Unless the regular rate is above 15%, in which case it just stays in place unchanged.)

For historical context, the overall average resembles the 19.8% tariff Franklin Roosevelt inherited from his predecessor Herbert Hoover in 1933. Alternatively, some specific product examples illustrate the daily-life impacts. Asian grocery stores buying cans of straw mushrooms from Vietnam, for example, will now pay 28.5% plus 6 cents per kilo. That’s three times the 8.5% plus 6 cents they were paying in March under the MFN tariff system. Auto repair shops buying Japanese or Korean brake-pads and fanbelts will pay 17.5% rather than 2.5% (and 15% for the German or Swedish equivalents); lovers of Dutch Gouda and Edam cheese, meanwhile, will pay 15% rather than the 10%. Or, in dollar terms, three months’ worth of “emergency decree” tariffs have already cost American buyers about $52 billion.

Tentative conclusion: Expect to pay more for things.

2a. Export commitments: Second, some Americans will benefit from export, intellectual property, and/or foreign investment commitments. Until the “deals” are published, we won’t know what these really are. But if the July 22 arrangement with Indonesia is a representative example, it includes some useful benefits and a lot of murkier “agreements to talk.” On the “useful” side, the U.S.-Indonesia “Joint Statement on Framework for United States-Indonesia Reciprocal Trade” unambiguously says Indonesia will “support a permanent moratorium on customs duties on electronic transmissions at the WTO immediately and without conditions”. (PPI view on the 30-year-old WTO “moratorium” and its value here.) The clauses on tariff and non-tariff issues, by contrast, lack timelines and feature cryptic phrasing: the U.S. and Indonesia “will work together to address Indonesia’s non-tariff barriers that affect bilateral trade and investment in priority areas” such as cars and agriculture, and “will negotiate facilitative rules of origin that ensure that the benefits of the agreement accrue primarily to the United States and Indonesia.”

Tentative conclusion: Wait to see the agreement texts before drawing any conclusions.

2b. Investment commitments: The arrangements with high-income allies also feature some commitments to invest in the United States, in the form of headline numbers: “$600 billion” from the EU, a “$350 billion” Korean investment fund, and “Japan will invest $550 billion directed by the United States to rebuild core American industries.” To put this in context, in 2024, Japanese firms invested $39 billion in U.S. industries through FDI, and Japan’s holdings of long-term securities grew by $91 billion. So new Japanese investment in the U.S. would likely hit $550 billion naturally over a few years, and the commitment might mean very little in real life. Alternatively, and more positively, the U.S. and Japanese governments might encourage specific private-sector investments like Nippon Steel’s purchase of the troubled U.S. Steel corporation.

Tentative conclusion: Don’t expect much.

3. Uncertainty: Finally, the so-called deals’ lives may be short. They all originate in the April 2 decree declaring the U.S. trade balance to be a “national emergency,” and then using the International Emergency Economic Powers Act to override Congressionally set tariff rates. The specialized U.S. Court of International Trade’s “V.O.S. Selections vs. Trump” decision struck down all the “IEEPA” tariffs on May 28 as an impermissible grab at Congress’ Constitutional power to set rates for “Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises.” The Court of Appeals heard oral argument on this ruling last Thursday, and the Supreme Court will probably get the case this fall. If the C.I.T.’s view holds up, the “deals,” tariffs, costs, and (probably) commitments could be gone by Christmas.

Nor are the courts the sole source of uncertainty — the administration itself is another. The “deals” originate in a belief that the U.S. trade balance is a “national emergency.” (Professional economists pretty much shred that idea here.) But the effect of any deals on trade balance will be only marginal. This is because (a) a country’s trade balance equals the gap between its savings and its investment; (b) combining July’s tax cut bill with higher tariffs almost certainly means a higher U.S. fiscal deficit, and therefore (all else equal) a somewhat lower U.S. national savings rate, and (c) barring some unexpected surge in family savings, or a collapse in investment, the trade deficit will probably rise. If that’s the case, the administration might rip up this year’s arrangements and start all over again next summer — as it has done with the first Trump administration’s 2018 renegotiation of the U.S.-Korea Free Trade Agreement, which it wrongly advertised at the time as having “secured changes that will reduce the trade deficit”.

Tentative conclusion: Don’t expect policy stability soon.

FURTHER READING

PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:

• Defend the Constitution and oppose rule by decree;
• Connect tariff policy to growth, work, prices and family budgets, and living standards;
• Stand by America’s neighbors and allies;
• Offer a positive alternative.

Compare and contrast:

The National Archives’ official Constitution transcript; see Article I, Sec. 8 for power to set rates for “Taxes, Duties, Imposts, and Excises”, and to “regulate Commerce with foreign Nations”.

And from the administration, the “Joint Statement” with Indonesia; “Fact Sheets” for Japan, Korea, and the European Union; and an overall summary.

Legal update:

Court of Appeals oral arguments from last Thursday.

The administration’s Court of Appeals filing.

Amicus brief from House and Senate Democrats defending Congressional tariff authority.

Economists’ amicus brief explaining that trade balances are not emergencies.

The Court of International Trade’s May 28th decision (see V.O.S. Selections v. Trump, #25-66)

… or direct to the V.O.S. Selections v. Trump opinion in a PDF.

International Emergency Economic Powers Act text.

A solution:

Rep. Linda Sanchez (D-Cal.) and all other Ways and Means Committee Democrats propose a revision of IEEPA, Section 301, and Section 232 to require Congressional approval of any new tariffs, quotas, or other trade limits under these laws.

And some econ. and stat background:

The IMF on the basics of savings, investment, trade balance, current accounts, when they might matter, and when they probably don’t.

And from the Census, a one-page sheet with U.S. exports, imports, and trade balances from 1960 to 2024.

ABOUT ED

Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.

Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.

Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

Read the full email and sign up for the Trade Fact of the Week.

FACT: High-seas pirate attacks are up 50% this year.

THE NUMBERS: Pirate attacks* –

* International Maritime Bureau.

WHAT THEY MEAN: 

Statistically, the risk of a pirate attack isn’t high. UNCTAD’s Review of Maritime Transport found 108,789 civilian vessels — trawlers, cruise ships, container ships, tankers, etc. — on the water last year. Fishing fleet data is less precise, but FAO’s most recent State of World Fisheries and Aquaculture suggests that somewhere around 70,000 big fishing boats. Set against these tens of thousands of ships, the Kuala Lumpur-based International Maritime Bureau reported 116 pirate attacks last year. This is the second-lowest total in their thirty years of reporting, and down nearly 80% from the 471-attack peak in 2005.

Nonetheless, it’s bad if it happens to you. The May 30 attack on the MV Orange Frost illustrates. This is an eight-year-old refrigerated bulk carrier, built in Taiwan and Curacao-flagged, 8,726 deadweight tons and 137 meters long. At the time, it was carrying a cargo of fish from Cameroon to the Republic of Congo. IMB’s attack summary:

“Seven pirates boarded the ship underway. [Note: they were steaming south past Sao Tome e Principe, about 70 nautical miles from nearest land.] Alarm raised, distress message activated, and all but two crew retreated into the citadel. A Nigerian Navy team responded, boarded the ship, and assisted the crew. On inspecting the ship bloodstains were identified near a ladder used by the pirates. It is suspected a crew member [later reported to be the second engineer] was kidnapped. The ship sailed to a safe port.”

As an example of this year’s pirate events, this one is pretty typical. First, it occurred in a high-risk location, the Gulf of Guinea being one of three long-time centers of pirate activity, along with the busy Southeast Asian waters around Singapore and Indonesia, and the Horn of Africa. Second, like 71 of the 90 attacks this year, this was a high-seas attack in international waters; only 15 attacks so far have targeted ships at anchor, and only four ships in dock. Third, bulk carriers are frequent targets, hit  in 34 attacks so far this year, as against 23 on tankers, 13 container ships, 4 fishing trawlers, and the remaining 16 miscellaneous vessels. And finally, it had apparently limited goals, with the pirates looking for a theft and kidnapping-for-ransom opportunity rather than trying a full hijacking.

Stepping back a bit, though, IMB’s data suggests that pirate attacks are becoming more frequent and more dangerous. Some indicators:

• The attack on MV Orange Frost was the 62nd of 90 such attacks so far this year – 50% up from the 60 attacks reported in the first half of 2024.
• Seven attacks involved kidnappings like that of the unlucky Second Engineer, a Russian national whose fate hasn’t been reported;
• 34 attacks involved guns, nearly as many as the 43 involving firearms in the years 2021, 2022, and 2023 combined; and
• Four involved successful hijacking of an entire ship, as compared to four ship hijackings in all of 2024, one each in 2021 and 2022, and two in 2023.

By region, attack counts are sharply up this year in two of the three high-risk areas.  The biggest jump has been in maritime Southeast Asia, with 57 of this year’s 90 attacks in the Singapore Strait.  IMB’s summary suggests that these are mainly opportunistic operations: “Pirates/robbers [in the Singapore Strait] are usually armed with guns, knives, and/or machetes. Pirates/robbers normally approach vessels during the night. When spotted and alarm is sounded, the pirates/robbers usually escape without confronting the crew.”

Attack counts are also up (though totals are lower) around the Horn of Africa.  Here, ships must pick their way between an ominously reviving Somali pirate fleet to the south and the Houthi movement running Yemen on the north. Where most Southeast Asian and West African pirates appear to be small-scale (though violent) opportunists, Somalia’s pirates operate on an industrial scale, using military weapons and in the 2010s attacking ships as far south as Mozambique and Madagascar:

“Somali pirates have the capability to target vessels over 1000 nautical miles from coast using ‘mother vessels.’ In 2025, two fishing vessels and a dhow were hijacked.  … Generally, Somali pirates tend to be well armed with automatic weapons and RPGs.  They sometimes use skiffs launched from mother vessels, which may themselves be hijacked fishing vessels or dhows.”

At their peak 15 years ago, Somali pirates had captured 49 ships and were holding over 1,000 crew hostage.  International naval patrols suppressed the industry in the mid-2010s.  It may now be reviving, perhaps taking advantage of the “security shadow” cast to the north of the Gulf of Aden by the Houthi militant movement in Yemen, to resume large-scale pirate ventures. Somali pirates mounted all four of last year’s successful ship hijacks, and three of this year’s four.

The Gulf of Guinea has been quieter, with no rise this year. So MV Orange Frost appears to have had bad luck. We haven’t found any public updates on the unfortunate Second Engineer’s status, but the in general May attack seems to have interrupted the ship’s business only temporarily.  Having finished a Mauritania-Ghana trip last week, it’s now back in Congo.

FURTHER READING

The International Maritime Bureau’s piracy reporting for January to June 2025 (with archives for earlier reports).

The U.S. Navy tallies threats to civilian shipping worldwide.

The Nigerian Navy recounts the rescue of MV Orange Frost.

… and MV Orange Frost itself is back to business.

The rise, fall, and possible revival of Somalia’s pirate fleet:

The Brookings Institution has background on the Somali pirate industry’s 2000-2010 peak.

Combined Task Force 151, led this year by Pakistan, squashed it by 2015.

Pretoria-based Institute for Security Studies/Africa reports on its recent revival.

And some boat counts: 

UNCTAD counts civilian cargo vessels, and reports on worldwide maritime trade as of 2024.

And FAO’s estimates of the fishery fleet.

ABOUT ED

Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.

Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.

Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

Read the full email and sign up for the Trade Fact of the Week.

FACT: American shipyards are building three of the 5,448 large commercial vessels on order worldwide.

THE NUMBERS: Major commercial vessels on order, 2024* –

* BRS Shipbrokers 2025 Annual Review

WHAT THEY MEAN: 

Ecclesiastes 1:9: “The thing that hath been, it is that which shall be; and this which is done is that which shall be done: and there is no new thing under the sun.” 

The Biden administration’s signature economic plan — “industrial strategy” to rejuvenate aging industries or create new ones — tried to use loans, tax credits, and regulations to ramp up semiconductor chip production and build electric vehicles, battery factories, and low-emission power plants. Its authors achieved less than they hoped. A big reason was their addition of extra costs and qualification hurdles related to different priorities — especially the expensive “Buy American” mandates, but also hiring guidelines, child-care rules, etc. — to the core “more chip-making” and “low-carbon future” goals. This meant industrial-strategy projects cost more, arrived later, had less real-world impact, and wound up more associated in the public mind with spending and higher prices than industry and jobs.

“The thing that hath been done, it is that which shall be.” This spring, the Trump administration adopted the last Biden-era program — an effort to use fees on arriving Chinese-built or Chinese-owned/operated ships to subsidize creation of a U.S. commercial shipbuilding industry. They’re also repeating the Biden team’s extra-cost mistake: Mr. Trump’s obsession with tariffs, especially on metals, suggests that though the shipbuilding program will raise costs for Americans, it won’t launch many ships. Background:

The hope of the chip and EV programs was to enlarge, and partially reshape, large existing industries with lots of capacity, skilled workers, and engineering talent. Reviving commercial shipbuilding is a bigger job. It’s been 70 years since American shipyards built many cargo vessels — the U.S. share of world commercial shipbuilding was only around 2% in the 1960s and 1970s, and has been under 1% since the late 1980s. The current data:

1. Vessel orders: BRS Shipbrokers’ annual review reports 5,448 large cargo vessels on order worldwide in 2024. These are the container ships, tankers, ro/ros, grain carriers, etc. that will carry the world’s cargoes in the 2030s. Chinese yards are making 3,419 of them, while Japan and Korea combine for 1,378. EU countries are building 197; Vietnam, India, Turkey, and the Philippines do most of the rest. The U.S.’ count was an inglorious “three”.

2. Vessel costs: U.S.-built cargo vessels are also expensive. The three 3,620-TEU (i.e., 3,620 twenty-foot containers) Aloha-class container ships under construction at the Philly Yard, destined for domestic Jones Act transport rather than “blue water” intercontinental cargoes, cost about $330 million each. By comparison, the 32 giant container ships Maersk reportedly contracted last year to buy from Korea’s Hanwha Ocean — 22,000 TEU to 24,000 TEU apiece, six times Aloha-class capacity — cost about $272 million each. (Comical asterisk: Hanwha bought the Philly Yard last December, and presumably inherits the Aloha-class contract.)

Given how few commercial ships Americans now build and how much they cost, this industrial-strategy project looks, well, challenging. That doesn’t mean it’s impossible, though, and in an era of alarming naval competition, the idea has strategic appeal. But it at minimum needs enough money to:

(a) Purchase land and offer construction contracts to build shipyards able to assemble much larger ships.
(b) Recruit tens of thousands of specialized engineers, welders, and other workers.
(c) Drastically cut the price of U.S.-made ships, so yards could sell them to big international maritime companies as well as small captive-market Jones Act carriers.
(d) Perhaps underwrite some sort of technological leap, rethinking ship-construction methods altogether through advanced AI design, which might, maybe, possibly, help turn the U.S.’ lack of a big incumbent shipbuilder into a “first-mover” advantage.

Now to the fees. They result from a “Section 301” unfair trade petition filed in 2024 by a labor union group, arguing that Chinese subsidies since 2000 had damaged U.S. shipbuilding. The premise is intellectually shaky — U.S. yards were building just two commercial vessels in 2000 – but the Biden administration approved it, and the Trump administration uses it as the legal basis for fees that, barring some change in plan, by April 2028 will reach:

• $140 per net ton [note: a measurement of cargo capacity] for Chinese-owned or -operated ships.
• $33 per net ton or $250 per off-loaded container, whichever is higher, for Chinese-built container ships with capacity above 4,000 TEU.
• $14 per net ton for automobile carriers [note: perhaps legally vulnerable, as it covers all ro/ros made outside the U.S., not only those made or operated by Chinese firms].

Outside the shipbuilding world, the fees will mean new costs. At face value, the fee for unloading 10,000 containers from a Chinese-built container ship operated by a non-Chinese company looks like $2.5 million, and for similar vessels owned by Chinese or Hong Kong carriers, about $10.5 million. As shipping firms incorporate these costs into their cargo charges, prices would rise for both incoming consumer goods and factory or farm inputs (half of all container traffic). American seaports would lose some business, harming local and hinterland economies and reducing U.S. trucking and rail employment. And with fewer vessel calls, especially at smaller ports, exporters, too — especially western-state farmers — would have fewer choices among carriers and higher cargo charges, probably losing some overseas sales. (Exports are 20% of U.S. farm income.) Overall, one analyst this spring estimated, assuming average cost of $1 million per port call, that the fees might reduce U.S. GDP by 0.24% (about $72 billion), with the largest drops in farm income.

They probably won’t, though, bring in enough money for an industrial-strategy project this big. Where the Congressional appropriations and tax breaks for chip and EV production were large and predictable, vessel-call fee revenue would be uncertain and volatile. Importers and shipping firms (at least big ones which own lots of ships) can, after, shift vessel arrival patterns to reduce cost: use non-Chinese ships for American ports when possible; employ small ships exempt from fees more often; drop off Chinese-carried cargos in Mexico or Canada for land transport; centralize calls at very big American ports; bypass smaller ports.

Meanwhile, the Trump administration has adopted the Biden team’s characteristic error as well as its industrial-strategy concept. Fees or not, a different policy — higher tariffs, especially on metals — will likely scuttle their core ship-building goal.

Large ocean vessels, after all, are made of metal. Even relatively small Aloha-class container ships use about 14,000 tons of steel. Really big ones like Maersk’s 24,000-TEU EEE-class fleet — 399 meters from stern to bow, as long as an ultra-tall skyscraper is high — are colorfully said to use “eight Eiffel Towers” worth of steel, which would be around 55,000 tons. As a micro-illustration, each link in their anchor chains weighs almost 500 pounds. And even before Mr. Trump’s abrupt June steel-tariff hike (from an already very heavy 25% to 50%), U.S. prices were high. According to the Commerce Department, this spring’s average steel prices were:

In short, American shipbuilders pay twice as much as their Japanese or Korean competitors for steel. That’s an extra $30 million for even one big ship. The new 50% rate will add millions more. So will similar aluminum and copper tariffs. So will the administration’s 10% “baseline” and higher “reciprocal” tariffs on paint, wiring, telecom equipment, and other inputs, should they survive court scrutiny this summer. No foreign shipbuilder pays anything like this.

So: Creating a big U.S. commercial shipbuilding industry from near-scratch looks hard and
expensive under any circumstances. That doesn’t necessarily make it hopeless. But trying to create one, while also using tariffs to make U.S.-built ships even more expensive and harder to sell, is probably impossible. Ecclesiastes gets the mordant last word on the usually futile, and often endless, way public money flows into such “subsidies plus mandated cost increases” programs: “All the rivers run to the sea; yet the sea is not full.”

FURTHER READING

PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:

• Defend the Constitution and oppose rule by decree;
• Connect tariff policy to growth, work, prices and family budgets, and living standards;
• Stand by America’s neighbors and allies;
• Offer a positive alternative.

BRS Shipbrokers’ 2025 Annual Review has shipping orders by country and ship type as of
2024.
… or direct to the interactive version.

U.S. policy –

The White House’s maritime strategy.
The U.S. Trade Representative Office outlines its new shipping fees.
The “Section 301” petition soliciting them, filed by four unions and the AFL-CIO’s Maritime
Trades Department.
… and apposite verses from Ecclesiastes (KJV).

Commentary:
Farm Bureau on potential harm to U.S. farm exports.
World Shipping Council views on costs and unintended consequences.

U.S. shipbuilding:
A gloomy 2023 Congressional Research Service look at U.S. shipbuilding.
… and the near-identical 2002 outlook from the Center for Naval Analysis.
The backstory from engineering/construction blogger Brian Potter. TL/DR: 19th century wooden-
ship golden age, early 20th-century fall, brief WWII revival, stasis since.
The Commerce Department reports on steel prices.
The Hanwha Philly Shipyard.
And Jones Act carrier Matson describes Aloha-class container vessels.

Abroad:
UNCTAD’s Review of Maritime Transport examines the world’s commercial shipping fleets.
Maersk explains ocean-shipping services.
Japan’s Imabari Shipbuilding Ltd.
And CSIS analysts Matthew Funaoile, Brian Hart, and Aidan Powers-Riggs on China’s dual-use shipbuilding empire.

ABOUT ED

Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.

Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.

Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

Read the full email and sign up for the Trade Fact of the Week.

FACT: The world child labor count has gone down by more than 100 million since 2000.

THE NUMBERS: Child labor by year, worldwide* –

* International Labour Organization estimates, from surveys done 2001-2025.

WHAT THEY MEAN: 

The American mental image of child labor emerges from early 20th-century social reform: Progressive Era photographs of wan children in coal mines and textile mills; factory-focused state government programs in the 1910s; national laws drawn up by Frances Perkins’ Department of Labor in the 1930s. For those looking abroad, the emphasis has been similar: factories, physical goods, supply chains, and children. International Labour Organization research, though, suggests that this is a relatively small share of modern-day child labor. Their most recent worldwide estimate, released on June 11, finds child labor mainly rural, concentrated in very poor countries, and steadily falling, especially in Asia.

As a point of departure, the ILO defines “child labor” as follows:

“[W]ork that is mentally, physically, socially or morally dangerous and harmful to children [aged 5 to 17]; and/or interferes with their schooling by: depriving them of the opportunity to attend school; obliging them to leave school prematurely; or requiring them to attempt to combine school attendance with excessively long and heavy work.”

ILO statisticians have been publishing periodic in-depth analyses of child labor every four years or so since 2002. Their reports include worldwide estimates; the regions in which child labor is most common and those in which it is rarest; change over time; and the “economic sectors” in which most child and teenager laborers work.

Their first report, for the year 2000, found 245.5 million boys and girls (one in six of that year’s 1.53 billion children) doing some form of child labor. The most recent, out in June, estimated 138 million child laborers among 1.90 billion children. Accepting some margin of error, the ILO surveys thus show the worldwide child rate falling by half in a generation — from 16.0% to 7.8% of all boys and girls — and the actual number of child laborers down by 108 million.  Three basic points from these reports, then a thought on the American role:

1. Child labor rates closely track poverty rates. The world’s 26 poorest countries, with about 8% of the world population, are home to 42% of all child laborers: 57.7 million, one in four (23.5%) of these countries’ 245 million children. Child labor rates in high-income countries — the United States and Canada, western Europe, Japan, Korea and Taiwan, Australia and New Zealand — average 0.7%, with a total of 1.6 million child laborers. In between these poles, rates are 3.6% in upper-middle-income countries and 7.5% in lower-middle-income countries.

2. Child labor is mostly rural. The 2025 report finds 61% of child laborers — about 84 million boys and girls — in agriculture, mostly in small family farms and enterprises.  This is often hazardous: per the ILO, child labor in agriculture often involves “exposure to sharp tools (machetes) and dangerous machinery (tractors), risk of snakebites and injuries from other animals, exposure to extreme environmental conditions, and exposure to agrochemicals including inorganic fertilizers and pesticides.” Another 27% of child laborers, 37 million, are in simple urban services such as house-cleaning, food delivery, and shops. The remaining 13%, or 18 million, are in “industry” — that is, on construction sites, in mines, and in factories. Industry work, then, is a relatively small share of all child labor, but appears especially dangerous: 60% of “industry” child labor (meaning 11 million children) is in ‘hazardous’ work, as opposed to 30% in agriculture and 48% in services.

3. Child labor has fallen fastest in Asia. Since the ILO’s first report a quarter-century ago, Asia-Pacific countries — economically growing fast, and demographically rapidly urbanizing — have cut child labor counts from 127 million to 27 million, and to a “rate” of 3.1%. The data:

In Latin America and the Caribbean likewise, the ILO’s estimates of child labor have dropped from 17.4 million in 2000 to 7.4 million in 2024, though the ‘rate’ is somewhat higher than Asia’s at 5.5%. (Or, adding the U.S., Canada, and Greenland to get the “western hemisphere,” 3.9%, which still leaves Asia’s child labor rate the world’s lowest.)  The Arab world and the ILO’s “Europe and Central Asia” region are at 5.8% and 5.6%. Child labor is now concentrated in sub-Saharan Africa (relatively more ‘rural’ than other regions, and with 20 of the world’s 25 ‘low-income countries’). which is home to 87 million child laborers or nearly two-thirds of the worldwide total. Africa’s pattern of child labor mirrors the worldwide “sectoral” pattern, except more intensely: 70% of African child workers are on farms, and only 8% in “industry.”

How to respond? In principle, ILO’s data suggests that urbanization, economic development, and some focused government policies, have sharply reduced child labor over the last generation, especially in Asia; and that child labor is least common, but especially dangerous, in ‘industry’.  With this as the backdrop, U.S. policies, usually focused on child labor in industry (or manufacturing specifically, or international “supply chains”) rather than in agriculture and services, can be criticized as targeting a relatively small part of the child labor phenomenon, but also defended as focused on especially high-risk work.

Debating whether this is still the right approach would be interesting. But unfortunately such an argument would likely miss the point, since current policies suggest that the U.S. won’t be much involved at all in next-generation efforts to reduce child labor.

The Trump administration’s rejection of open-market trade policies, and its attempt to abolish almost all development aid, mean that for the next three years (barring some very sharp turnaround), the U.S. will contribute little to the larger economic trends reducing child labor worldwide. More targeted American work on the most dangerous and worst forms of child labor may also be ending. Having stopped all Labor Department child labor and forced labor projects this spring, the administration hopes to abolish the $91 million U.S. contribution to the ILO, cut its International Labor Affairs Bureau — the group which handles these issues — by 40% (from $113.1 million to $70.2 million, and from 138 to 112 people), and shift ILAB’s remaining work away from humanitarian projects to “ensuring that American workers and businesses benefit from the Administration’s trade agenda by counteracting labor practices overseas that undermine American competitiveness.”

So, a sad U.S. note set against a picture of steady and impressive progress over the past generation. Americans can do better than this.

FURTHER READING

The ILO’s June 2025 report on worldwide child labor.

More from ILO:

Archives: The ILO reports from 2001, 2006, 2010, 2013, 2017, and 2021.

Lessons from reducing child labor through education policies in low-income countries.

And a look at child labor in agriculture.

U.S. policy now:

The Trump administration proposes cutting ILAB by 40% and “refocusing” its work on trade competition. (See under “Departmental Management”, on page 21).

… and to cut U.S. contributions to the International Labor Organization from $91 million to zero (pg. 96).

Not over yet: House Democrats hope to protect ILAB work.

U.S. policy then:

Child labor reports from the Labor Department’s International Labor Affairs Bureau (ILAB):  https://www.dol.gov/agencies/ilab/resources/reports/child-labor

President Clinton oversees the 1999 negotiation and ratification of the ILO Convention on the Worst Forms of Child Labor.

From the Biden/Harris administration, then-Secretary of Labor Martin Walsh at the ILO’s 2021 conference.

… and Tom Vilsack’s USDA on addressing rural child labor at home.

And the long look back:

The National Archives reprints Lewis Hine’s classic photographs of child labor in early 20th-century American streets, mines, and factories.

Smithsonian Magazine looks back on Frances Perkins.

And Economic History has data on the decline of child labor in the U.S. after the passage of state child labor laws in the 1910s and the national Fair Labor Standards Act in 1938.

ABOUT ED

Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.

Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.

Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

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FACT: Tariffs are taxes paid by Americans.

THE NUMBERS: U.S. GDP growth –

* International Monetary Fund projection, April 2025
** 2021-2024 growth rates from BEA

WHAT THEY MEAN: 

Mr. Trump’s April 2 tariff decree, claiming a “national emergency” related to trade balances, imposed (a) a 10% tariff on almost all the coffee, TV sets, automobile parts, shirts, and other things American buy from abroad, and (b) higher rates up to 50% on things from 57 specific trading partners, from Bosnia and Jordan to the European Union.  Following a bond-market rout on April 9, the administration “suspended” these latter rates for 90 days — i.e., today — in the hopes of making “deals”. Monday’s extension of this deadline to August 1st for at least some countries comes with renewed threats, similar though not always identical to those of April 2. (They range from 25% to 40% this time, and cover 14 countries: Kazakhstan, Cambodia, Tunisia, South Africa, Japan, Korea, Indonesia, Bangladesh, Thailand, Serbia, Bosnia, etc.).  These may all be struck down in a few weeks, as on July 31 the Court of Appeals will hear arguments on the May 28 lower-court opinion declaring the entire April 2 decree, and therefore anything using it as a base, illegal. If that doesn’t happen, here’s a look at the likely impacts, through the lens of a “deal”  the administration announced (perhaps prematurely) last Thursday:

Big picture first: Last April, the International Monetary Fund cut its U.S. growth estimate by nearly a point, from a 2.7% guess in mid-January to 1.8%. (In dollars, this means about $200 billion less U.S. output, with an original $730 billion in growth falling to $535 billion.) Excluding the -2.2% contraction in the pandemic year 2020 as an anomaly, a 1.8% growth year would be the U.S.’s lowest in 15 years. Or, more recently, it’s a point below the 2022-2024 average.  The Commerce Department’s Bureau of Economic Analysis, which does the U.S. government’s GDP-estimating, reports a -0.5% contraction in this year’s first quarter, so the IMF seems on track or even a bit optimistic.

Trade “deals” and anti-growth: The administration’s description, posted last Thursday, of a ‘trade deal’ with Vietnam — as of this morning, the only one reported so far among countries targeted in the April 2 decree — helps explain the impact of trade policy on these forecasts:

“Vietnam will pay the United States a 20% tariff on any and all goods sent into our territory, and a 40% tariff on any transshipping. In return, Vietnam will do something that they have never done before, give the United States of America total access to their markets for trade. In other words, they will ‘open their markets to the United States,’ meaning that, we will be able to sell our product into Vietnam at zero tariff.”

The first two sentences aren’t true. “Vietnam” won’t pay anything, and its government made much larger “access” offers to join the Trans-Pacific Partnership in the 2010s.  This “deal’s” nature and lifespan (even if the Court of Appeals doesn’t scrap it next month) are likewise uncertain, as neither the White House nor the U.S. Trade Representative Office has posted any actual text. But assuming that at least the “20%” (cut back from a 48% April 2 rate) and “40%” figures are correct, and that it isn’t swiftly terminated, here’s the likely impact of “deals” of this sort.

1. Vietnam won’t pay any of this. Americans buy about $130 billion worth of goods from Vietnam each year, mainly consumer goods found in retail stores and groceries: TV sets, laptops, and smartphones; shoes and clothes; furniture; seafood, coffee, canned tropical vegetables, and so on. Imposing a 20% tariff on them does not mean that “Vietnam” as a country, or the Vietnamese government, or Vietnam-based companies, will pay anything.  The ones who pay are the buyers — American retailers, food wholesalers, grocery stores, and so on  — who will write checks to CBP for 20% of their cargoes’ value when furniture and clothes dock at Long Beach, or laptops and coffee arrive on the incoming tide at New Orleans.

2. You will pay. The buyers’ tariff payment, in turn, is included in the bill you pay in the store. This is because these buyers add it to the bills they’ve paid to their Vietnamese supplier and to the shipping company carrying across the Pacific to the United States. The result is the “landed cost” from which they mark up to cover costs — wages, building rent, transport, maintenance, marketing, etc. — and leave a profit margin. If the product doesn’t sell, the store takes the loss; if you buy it, you cover their tariff cost. Using the hypothetical example of a container carrying 1,000 Vietnamese-made wooden chairs valued at $100 each, here’s the arithmetic:

Notes: The average import value of a wooden Vietnamese chair last year was $106; the table uses $100 for simplicity.  The $5000 payment to the shipper is based on typical current container rates for a Ho Chi Minh City-to-Los Angeles transit. The markup is purely hypothetical; real-world markups vary by company and product. State sales taxes range from 0% to 7.25%, the 5% is a rough average.

So the administration’s “deal” here is for you to pay $42 more for a chair.  Fundamentally, you’re out $42, the federal government gets $20 in tariff money, and your state government gets $2 in sales tax.  The remaining $20 mostly evaporates as “deadweight loss.” Looking back to the IMF’s forecasts, and scaling this up for U.S. trade in general:

Family price impacts: Spread across the country and all consumer goods, retailers will lose some business as they try to sell higher-priced chairs; buyers such as yourself will pay more; and the country will lose some GDP as more twenties vanish around the country.

Producer impacts: Where most Vietnamese imports are “consumer” goods like the chairs, shoes, and TV sets, Canada’s product mix is heavy on energy, fertilizer, and natural resources. The EU’s tilts toward medicines, cars, chemicals, and industrial inputs.  Retailers, groceries, and restaurants do buy a lot of Canadian and European goods, and with higher tariffs, they’d pay more and charge more. But the impact of tariffs on Canadian and European goods — that’s fully a third of all U.S. goods imports last year — will fall relatively harder on American manufacturers, farmers, hospitals, and building contractors. Facing higher costs, these businesses would lose some competitiveness vis-à-vis imports and especially as exporters. Their higher production costs, meanwhile, would raise inflationary pressure on the “producer price” side and give Federal Reserve economists some extra reason to avoid interest rate cuts.

So: as the IMF’s forecasts and the BEA’s reporting to date both suggest, the likely effect of “deals” like this one will be somewhat lower living standards and a drop in growth rates.

FURTHER READING

PPI’s four principles for response to tariffs and economic isolationism:

• Defend the Constitution and oppose rule by decree;
• Connect tariff policy to growth, work, prices and family budgets, and living standards;
• Stand by America’s neighbors and allies;
• Offer a positive alternative.

PPI’s Ed Gresser testifies on tariffs at the Joint Economic Committee, December 2024; PDF version here.

Macro background:

The IMF’s April World Economic Outlook update.

The Bureau of Economic Analysis’ most recent GDP report shows a drop of 0.5% in January-March 2025.

Legal outlook:

The White House’s April 2 tariff decree.

The Court of International Trade’s unanimous May 28 opinion ruling it unconstitutional.

… our look at the C.I.T. decision.

Next up, with oral argument coming July 31, the Court of Appeals brief from the Liberty Justice Center.

ABOUT ED

Ed Gresser is Vice President and Director for Trade and Global Markets at PPI.

Ed returns to PPI after working for the think tank from 2001-2011. He most recently served as the Assistant U.S. Trade Representative for Trade Policy and Economics at the Office of the United States Trade Representative (USTR). In this position, he led USTR’s economic research unit from 2015-2021, and chaired the 21-agency Trade Policy Staff Committee.

Ed began his career on Capitol Hill before serving USTR as Policy Advisor to USTR Charlene Barshefsky from 1998 to 2001. He then led PPI’s Trade and Global Markets Project from 2001 to 2011. After PPI, he co-founded and directed the independent think tank ProgressiveEconomy until rejoining USTR in 2015. In 2013, the Washington International Trade Association presented him with its Lighthouse Award, awarded annually to an individual or group for significant contributions to trade policy.

Ed is the author of Freedom from Want: American Liberalism and the Global Economy (2007). He has published in a variety of journals and newspapers, and his research has been cited by leading academics and international organizations including the WTO, World Bank, and International Monetary Fund. He is a graduate of Stanford University and holds a Master’s Degree in International Affairs from Columbia Universities and a certificate from the Averell Harriman Institute for Advanced Study of the Soviet Union.

Read the full email and sign up for the Trade Fact of the Week.