Erik Brynjolfsson, Xiang Hui, Meng Liu
Protectionism has been on the rise in recent years. Brexit and the China-US trade war are but a couple of examples marking the shift from previous traditions of openness towards the mobility of people, goods, and services. There is much support for the contention that restriction of trade and imposed barriers to cross-border movement are associated with a net economic loss (Delpeuch et al. 2021).
Amiti et al. (2019) calculated the deadweight cost of welfare following the protectionist actions by the Trump administration during the 2018 China-US trade war. The decrease in US real income amounted to approximately $6.9 billion during the first 11 months of 2018, with an additional cost imposed on domestic consumers and importers in the form of tariffs at roughly $12.3 billion.