Who actually paid for the 2018 US tariffs, and what did they do to the pattern of trade?
The Impact of the 2018 Tariffs on Prices and Welfare
Mary Amiti, Stephen J. Redding, David E. Weinstein (2019) · Journal of Economic Perspectives 33(4)
Article ↗ · Replication data ↗ (openICPSR)
The archive requires an account we do not hold, so the files were not opened. What follows rests on the published abstract and on this platform's own observations.
What the authors found
Amiti, Redding and Weinstein find that the 2018 tariffs were passed through almost completely into the prices US importers paid: the cost fell on US firms and consumers rather than on foreign exporters, with little evidence in that first year that foreign suppliers cut their prices to absorb it. They also document sharp reorganisation of supply chains as importers moved away from targeted goods.
What our data adds
IMF bilateral trade in this database records what happened next. US goods imports from China peaked at 563 billion dollars in 2018, the tariff year itself, then fell to 472 billion in 2019 — a drop of 16 per cent in a single year. The series recovered through the pandemic, reaching 576 billion in 2022, and has since fallen again to 379 billion in 2025, the lowest figure in a decade. The reorganisation the authors saw beginning in 2018 did not reverse; on this evidence it continued for seven years.
| Figure | Value | Indicator |
|---|---|---|
| US goods imports from China, 2018 | 563bn USD | IMTS.MG_CIF_USD.A |
| US goods imports from China, 2019 | 472bn USD | IMTS.MG_CIF_USD.A |
| One-year change | -16% | IMTS.MG_CIF_USD.A |
| US goods imports from China, 2025 | 379bn USD | IMTS.MG_CIF_USD.A |
Every figure here is computed from observations in this database and can be charted, downloaded or queried.
What this cannot show
This is the quantity of trade, not its price, so it cannot speak to the paper's central claim about who bore the cost — that needs the import price indices the authors used, which are not in this database. Nor can a bilateral total separate goods that were tariffed from goods that were not, or distinguish trade genuinely reshored from trade rerouted through a third country, which several studies since have argued is a large part of the fall.