Tariff co-incidence
The tariffs announced by President Trump are based on what he describes as tariffs imposed by other countries on the US. These don’t bear any obvious relationship to the numbers that ordinary economists would describe as tariffs
However, a poster on Twitter, @nonagonono, found there is a strong relationship between the claimed tariff and the countries import/export balance with the US
We want to be a little sceptical of relationships that come just from data-dredging, with no real theory, but this relationship is tight enough that it probably isn’t just a coincidence, and probably does tell us something about the definition of ‘tariff’ the President is using. If so, the ‘tariff’ of 20% that New Zealand allegedly imposes is actually a trade deficit of 20%, which is not quite what I get from NZ trade figures (24%) but is close enough that some slight changes in definition might explain it.
Thomas Lumley (@tslumley) is Professor of Biostatistics at the University of Auckland. His research interests include semiparametric models, survey sampling, statistical computing, foundations of statistics, and whatever methodological problems his medical collaborators come up with. He also blogs at Biased and Inefficient See all posts by Thomas Lumley »
Comments
Add a comment
First time commenting? Please use your real first name and surname and read the Comment Policy.
Apparently the trade only counts “Goods” and not “Services”. If Trump counted services then it would look very different. Anyway, it appears he’s tariffing uninhabited islands.
3 weeks ago
The ‘ remote dependencies’ you mention, Norfolk Is and Christmas Is which are inhabited semi separate parts of Australia are also mentioned, are because US has noticed that some countries shift their “origin” of the goods to suit lower tariffs or taxes. Its only closing loopholes that would be exploited. Uber in NZ say they are based in Singapore is similar
3 weeks ago
An alternative, which explains Heard & Macdonald islands, Réunion, Svalbard, and (notably) the British Indian Ocean Territories (almost entirely inhabited by US military), is that someone was working from a list of top-level domain names.
3 weeks ago
https://ustr.gov/issue-areas/reciprocal-tariff-calculations
Have to add in halving for being “kind” and there you have it.
3 weeks ago
“be a little sceptical of relationships that come just from data-dredging, with no real theory”
That approach would wipe out 50% of published heath research that uses very large numbers of people in their study
3 weeks ago
No, it would just mean they needed confirmation before taking them too seriously, which is one of the things I’ve been saying on StatsChat for the last decade.
3 weeks ago