I finally found a comparison of tariffs between countries.
Again, I’m no fan of tariffs, but you can definitely see why Trump is ticked off, saying that most of the world is getting away with inequality.
Here’s the takeaway:
Taking all of these tariff figures into account, it can be hard to come up with a precise ranking, but you can see that New Zealand and Australia are the low tariff leaders. The U.S., EU, Canada, Japan, and Switzerland come next, clustered closely together. Mexico has tariffs that are a bit higher. Then come China and Brazil with even higher tariffs.
There is lots of talk from the Trump administration these days about how the U.S. is getting cheated on trade. In this context, they have done some cherry-picking of the data to emphasize high foreign tariffs, while conveniently ignoring high U.S. tariffs. For example, Trump will mention a 270% Canadian tariff on dairy products, without mentioning U.S. tariffs of up to 187% on sour cream. Or White House trade adviser Peter Navarro will mention EU auto tariffs of 10% and argue that those are much higher than the 2.5% tariffs for car imports to the U.S, but he won’t mention the 25% U.S. tariff on truck imports.
So what’s the reality of tariff levels? The cherry-picking approach emphasizes particular products where tariffs are high, and as can be seen in the examples above there are still a few of these “tariff peaks,” including some imposed by the U.S. But with so much variation on tariffs by product, an average tariff level is more informative. Unfortunately, it can be difficult to get an accurate picture of this (as discussed here).
Comparing Countries’ Tariff Levels
There is lots of talk from the Trump administration these days about how the U.S. is getting cheated on trade. In this context, they have done some cherry-picking of the data to emphasize high foreign tariffs, while conveniently ignoring high U.S. tariffs. For example, Trump will mention a 270% Canadian tariff on dairy products, without mentioning U.S.