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Document Type

Article

Abstract

The Trump administration launched a series of actions to raise import tariffs against major U.S. trading partners, particularly China. In response, China retaliated against the U.S. by imposing higher tariffs targeting exports produced in Republican-supporting counties. Soybeans and corn are two targeted agricultural exports with the same tariff rates. However, due to the drastic difference in export amount to China, farmers in counties dominating in producing soybeans would have more negative economic impacts than counties mainly producing corn. In this paper, I use individual farmers’ donations to examine the effect of this retaliatory tariff shock from the trade war on farmer voters’ attitudes toward their political party in the agricultural counties in the most affected areas ---- the central region of the United States. The empirical results show that China’s retaliatory tariff shock has a negative but not significant impact on the value of soybean production compared to corn production and also an unexpected positive but not significant impact on farmers’ donations in general. Finally, I do find a significant negative impact from farmers’ donations towards the Republican Party because of China’s retaliatory tariff shock.

Publication Date

July 2023

Journal Title

Proceedings of the Jepson Undergraduate Conference on International Economics

Volume

5

Issue

1

Copyright

©2023 by Proceedings of the Jepson Undergraduate Conference on International Economics

Language

en

File Format

application/pdf

Included in

Economics Commons

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