Ed Manuel, Alice Pugh, Anina Thiel, Tugrul Vehbi and Seb Vismara
Average tariffs on goods traded between the US and China increased by 15 percentage points from early 2018 to 2019. By making it more costly to buy goods from abroad, higher tariffs have reduced global trade flows and spending by households and businesses. But ‘direct’ effects of tariffs are not the only ways in which trade-related issues can affect global growth. Trade-related uncertainty has risen sharply since the escalation of trade tensions in 2018, which may have caused businesses to postpone costly investment decisions and financial conditions to tighten. In this post we investigate the size of these ‘indirect’ channels.
