Author Description

In March 2018, the United States (US) President Donald Trump announced the imposition of a tariff on US imports of steel and aluminium products. This Science for Policy report sheds light on the possible macroeconomic impacts of this policy, focusing in particular on exports, value added (VA), output and employment. The modelling analysis considers two possible scenarios to be compared with a baseline in which no tariffs are imposed by the US government. In the first scenario, we assume that the European Union (EU) is exempted from the new tariffs. In the second scenario, we instead assume that the EU is not exempted, as it has been announced on 31 May 2018. The remainder of the report is organised as follows. The next section provides a brief overview of the policy proposal, the relative importance of different trading partners for steel and aluminium trade with the US, and to what extent different EU countries might be exposed. Section 3 highlights the main characteristics of the model used. Section 4 describes the main results of the analysis and Section 5 concludes.