Recent scholarship finds significant price increases and welfare costs to the United States from the U.S.-China trade war. Given the mercantilist definition of “winning” often implied by a focus on the trade balance, this paper addresses a narrow question: what countries' exports to the U.S. benefited from the trade war? Focusing on China’s east and southeast Asian neighbors using a difference-in-difference approach, I find little evidence that any of these countries (or the rest of the world in general) increase exports to the U.S. due to the U.S. tariffs.
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