From TradeReform.Org
All 50 states have lost jobs to China
Written by Sara Haimowitz
Friday, 26 March 2010
The following was published in the March 27, 2010 edition of the EPI News:
As concern over the U.S.-China trade imbalance grows, a new paper by EPI's Senior International Economist Robert Scott finds that 2.4 million American jobs have been lost to China between 2001 and 2008, and that every state along with the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico has felt the impact.
Scott's paper, Unfair China Trade Costs Local Jobs, provides the first detailed analysis of the jobs that have been lost since China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. It finds that, in addition to impacting every U.S. state, the job loss has touched every Congressional district in the country.
New Hampshire, California, Texas all suffer big losses
Scott's paper features a color-coded U.S. map illustrating where job loss has been the most severe, as well as several detailed charts that measure job loss by industry and by state. New Hampshire, which lost 16,300 jobs during the seven-year period covered by the study, suffered the largest job loss as a share of total employment. In terms of total jobs displaced, California was first, with 370,000 jobs lost, followed by Texas, New York, Illinois, and Florida, which all lost more than 100,000 jobs.
In addition to the loss of jobs, the paper finds that U.S. workers who have kept their jobs have suffered depressed wages as a result of competition with lower-wage workers overseas. "The impact," the paper says, "has affected essentially all production workers with less than a four-year college degree - roughly 70% of the private-sector workforce, or about 100 million workers."
The paper received widespread media coverage throughout the United States, from the Sacramento Bee, to the Boston Herald, and The Toledo Blade. A Wall Street Journal story on the paper quoted Senator Charles Schumer (D., N.Y.) saying, "We've known for years that U.S. manufacturing's paying a heavy price for China's activities, but these figures exceeded even our worst expectations."
Scott's paper comes at a time of growing concern over Chinese currency manipulation, which has kept the cost of Chinese exports artificially low, making it increasingly difficult for U.S. manufacturers to compete. Unlike most other major currencies, the Chinese yuan does not fluctuate freely against the dollar. While the value of its currency should have increased as China exported more goods, it has instead stayed low, and China has aggressively acquired dollars to further depress the yuan's value.
Earlier this month, EPI hosted a panel on Currency Manipulation, where speakers including Nobel Prize-winning economist Paul Krugman, stressed that a change of policy was needed to address an extremely depressed Chinese yuan, which was fueling massive trade deficits in the United States and Europe and threatening hopes of an economic recovery.
http://www.tradereform.org/content/view/2489/52/
