Adventures of a self-learning data scientist - Chinese retaliation is half the size of their claim

Author

Mitsuo Shiota

Published

April 25, 2019

After I confirmed each tariff list of USTR really covers 34, 16 and 200 billion dollars imports from China, I have turned to Chinese claims that their retaliation tariff list covers 3, 34, 16 and 60 billion dollar imports from the US. As China imports from the US are the US exports to China, I can use the same Census Bureau U.S. International Trade Data to confirm their claims.

And my calculation suggests that the Chinese hit-backs are half the size of their claims . My guess is that they calculated the size based on HTS 6 digit codes, while they actually impose tariffs based on both 6 and 8 digit codes.

---
title: Chinese retaliation is half the size of their claim
author: Mitsuo Shiota
date: '2019-04-25'
categories:
  - economics
  - R
---

After [I confirmed each tariff list of USTR really covers 34, 16 and 200 billion dollars imports from China](https://github.com/mitsuoxv/us-tariffs-on-china), I have turned to Chinese claims that their retaliation tariff list covers 3, 34, 16 and 60 billion dollar imports from the US. As China imports from the US are the US exports to China, I can use the same [Census Bureau U.S. International Trade Data](https://www.census.gov/foreign-trade/data/) to confirm their claims.

And my calculation suggests that [the Chinese hit-backs are half the size of their claims ](https://github.com/mitsuoxv/us-tariffs-on-china/blob/master/China-hits-back.md) . My guess is that they calculated the size based on HTS 6 digit codes, while they actually impose tariffs based on both 6 and 8 digit codes.