(Wl-5202)-Will Trump Tariffs Bring Back Manufacturing Jobs in the US?

According to the Trump administration the disruption caused by high tariffs on US trading partners is a precursor to negotiate a new world order where final tariff rates and trade relations would depend on how countries’ positions are in sync with the US image of the twenty-first century world order. The political imperative of creating jobs for average Americans has been addressed by imposing tariffs making imports costlier and creating incentive for reshoring manufacturing to the US. This paper primarily argues that deindustrialisation of US cannot be attributable to cheap imports alone, rather it is a result of financialization that brought huge gains to US corporates and asset holders and facilitated relocation of manufacturing to regions endowed with cheap labour and natural resources. The current crisis of jobs for those educated till high school levels is a result of automation that makes many routine jobs both in manufacturing and services obsolete. Hence tariffs may incentivise manufacturing value added but would hardly add jobs in advanced countries. Finally, the paper argues that ‘knowledge-intensive’ technological changes demand radical rethinking of the arrangement of production and distribution in addressing structural unemployment.