Import Competition and the Great US Employment Sag of the 2000s

• Main Authors: Dorn, David (Author), Hanson, Gordon H. (Author), Acemoglu, K. Daron (Contributor), Autor, David H (Contributor), Price, Brendan Michael (Contributor)
• Other Authors: Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Economics (Contributor)
• Format: Article
• Language: English
• Published: University of Chicago Press, 2016-12-28T14:56:58Z.
• Subjects: Article
• Online Access: Get fulltext

Even before the Great Recession, US employment growth was unimpressive. Between 2000 and 2007, the economy gave back the considerable employment gains achieved during the 1990s, with a historic contraction in manufacturing employment being a prime contributor to the slump. We estimate that import competition from China, which surged after 2000, was a major force behind both recent reductions in US manufacturing employment and-through input-output linkages and other general equilibrium channels-weak overall US job growth. Our central estimates suggest job losses from rising Chinese import competition over 1999-2011 in the range of 2.0-2.4 million.
William & Flora Hewlett Foundation
Alfred P. Sloan Foundation (Grant 2011-10-12)