Launch of Assessing Trade Agendas in the US Presidential Campaign

The Peterson Institute for International Economics (PIIE) presented a new PIIE Briefing, Assessing Trade Agendas in the US Presidential Campaign, on September 22, 2016. The lead PIIE authors, Reginald Jones Senior Fellow Gary Clyde Hufbauer and Executive Vice President and Director of Studies Marcus Noland, presented the striking results of their research on what the candidate proposals would actually do to the US economy. International Food Policy Research Institute Senior Research Fellow Sherman Robinson discussed the rigorous reproducible methods behind these results, and Mark Zandi, chief economist of Moody's Analytics, discussed this analysis in the context of his own and other mainstream projections of the US economic outlook under the two candidates.

The Institute undertook this research project because US trade policy has taken on an unprecedented prominence in this year’s election campaign, and because the two major party candidates for president have announced unprecedentedly anti-trade positions and proposals. This original indepth examination goes beyond the obvious fact that these proposals might be bad for the growth of US business and for relations with key allies at a broad level—the PIIE study reveals the shockingly great capability of the next US president to implement protectionist policies and even start a trade war on their own legal authority, and the specific harms that would be done to US incomes, communities, and security if they were implemented.

Gary Clyde Hufbauer has been the Reginald Jones Senior Fellow at PIIE since 1992. He was formerly the Maurice Greenberg Chair and Director of Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations during 1996–98 and deputy assistant secretary for international trade and investment policy of the US Treasury during 1977–79. He is a noted expert on international trade law, which he taught previously at Georgetown University, as well as on international economics.

Marcus Noland has been associated with PIIE since 1985. He was previously a senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisers in the Executive Office of the President of the United States. He has held research or teaching positions at Yale University, the Johns Hopkins University, the University of Southern California, and Tokyo University.

Sherman Robinson is a senior research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institute (IFPRI) and is also a professor of economics (emeritus) at the University of Sussex. During the Clinton administration, he was a senior economist at the Council of Economic Advisers, on leave from the University of California. At the Council, he worked primarily on trade issues, including regional trade agreements, GATT/WTO negotiations, and the North American Free Trade Agreement.

Mark Zandi directs economic research at Moody’s Analytics, and is a cofounder of economy.com. He is the author of several books, including Paying the Price: Ending the Great Recession and Beginning a New American Century, which provides an assessment of the monetary and fiscal policy response to the Great Recession. He recently coauthored the indepth analysis of the macroeconomic consequences of both Ms. Clinton and Mr. Trump’s economic policies.