By Steven L. Byers, PhD, and Jeff Ferry Last year the US registered its largest trade deficit in 12 years and its largest-ever deficit in goods trade. In this article, we review the main trends in US international trade in 2020. The US trade deficit continued to deteriorate in 2020 as it rose to a 12-year…
The Job Quality Index (JQI) rose 0.54 to 79.36 in the February reading as the decline in low-quality jobs prompted a small increase in the JQI. The JQI, produced by the Coalition for a Prosperous America in partnership with academics from Cornell Law School, measures the ratio of high-quality to low-quality jobs where high quality…
By Steven L. Byers, PhD, and Jeff Ferry The CPA Reshoring Index (CRI) rose to +173 in the first quarter of 2020, indicating that US manufacturers gained 1.73 percentage points of market share in the US market for manufactured goods. Import penetration in US manufacturing in the first quarter fell to 28.9%, its lowest level…
According to a new CPA analysis, a Congressional five-year $1.5 trillion infrastructure investment plan could create 2.5 million jobs by 2025 while bringing sorely needed improvement to the nation’s deteriorating infrastructure. However, the analysis finds that a quarter of the spending would go on imported materials and supplies. The same infrastructure plan implemented under a…
By Jeff Ferry, CPA Chief Economist Joe Biden is getting lots of advice from many quarters for his new administration. But last week he got some from an unexpected quarter: Bob Swan, CEO of Intel, published an open letter urging Biden to pursue a national manufacturing strategy for the US semiconductor industry. “Rising costs and…
With imports down, America’s steelmakers have started investing at home. Americans may not be aware of it, but the United States has been experiencing a steel boom of late. Last month, U.S. Steel Corporation produced the first ton of steel at a brand-new facility in Fairfield, Alabama. Their new plant uses the latest and cleanest…
By Jeff Ferry, CPA Chief Economist Last year, the US raised the share of domestic demand for manufactured goods met by US production for the first time in six years. The CPA Reshoring Index shows a positive score of 59 basis points (bp) for 2019. It’s only the fourth positive figure since the data begins,…
In this article, published in Tax Notes Federal on Sept 21, 2020, CPA Chief Economist Jeff Ferry and CPA Board Member Bill Parks analyze the federal corporate tax paid by the S&P 500 companies in 2019 and find they paid on average less than 9% in cash federal tax last year. The authors compare it…
On Oct. 6th, CPA testified at a hearing of the US International Trade Commission on trade agreements. We focused on the failure of economic models to accurately forecast the impact of trade agreements on the US economy. We demonstrated how modifications of the standard economic model for trade can make the model more accurate. We…
This Working Paper examines the impact of the proposed Market Access Charge (MAC) on international capital inflows into the US economy and the domestic US economy. We build a model including the relationships between US capital flows, the dollar exchange rate, US trade, and the US domestic economy. Our conclusion is that a 5% MAC…