The Trump administration has adopted an aggressive tariff policy against China and other countries for a clear purpose: to force the other countries to change their policies by making their U.S. exports so expensive they have no customers. Yet there’s no way to estimate how effective Trump’s broad-based tariffs will be in doing that, according to economists and business groups.
The point at which a tariff makes a product so expensive that a buyer decides to purchase it from a different source or forgo it altogether rather than pay the levy varies wildly from product to product. So much so, there is no general rule translating the rate of a tariff to the decline in imports. Individual companies do calculate the trade-offs for products they import, but the information is a considered a trade secret and so is rarely released.
