Measures like President Trump’s tariffs on steel and aluminum might not be enough to block Chinese manufacturers from penetrating the U.S. railway industry, economics consultant and researcher Hamilton Galloway said in an interview that aired Monday on Hill.TV’s “Rising.”
“There’s a lot of cautionary tales that we need to be aware of from the U.S. side as we’re looking at trade relationships, and looking at creating some sort of area of protection for the domestic economy from these types of distortionary tactics from state-owned enterprises from CRRC and others,” Galloway, head of consultancy for the Americas at Oxford Economics, told Hill.TV’s Krystal Ball and Buck Sexton last week.
The state-owned China Railway Rolling Stock Corp. (CRRC) has made inroads in the U.S. freight rail industry in recent years by producing rail cars for transit systems in cities like Los Angeles and Chicago.
The company is also pursuing a contract with the D.C. area’s Metro system.
Washington and Beijing have been locked in a trade war for months. Early on, Trump slapped tariffs on steel and aluminum imports from various countries, not just China.
“For now, the tariffs that we have in place such as Section 232 of the steel and aluminum tariffs, give a little bit of a buffer, but it’s not a long-term, sustainable thing because it’s not targeting just China and some of those bad actors,” Galloway said. “You’re looking at a lot of other economies that are acting just like market economies, and they’re being affected as well.”
“At this point, there are a few tools for policies that we actually have here in the U.S. that the Department of Commerce can use, such as a countervailing duties, which is allotting a duty on a specific product that might be coming into the U.S. that is using a lot of unfair trade or unfair business practices,” he added.
— Julia Manchester
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