Tariffs can also be an effective way of balancing buisness advantages. An example: Germany has quite high standards in its farming sector. This applys to what pesticides you are allowed to use, how much fertiliser you can use, what conditions animals have to live in and so on. Everything that you have to do to comply with these rules costs money, so in order to still make a profit you need to charge quite high prices. If you then compare these with the almost non existent standards of, as example Brazil, you quickly realise, that they are capable of producing goods much cheaper (who could have guessed, that its cheaper if you can just imassively increase your land by land grabbing, giving a shit on everything and using the most efficient, but very cruel, ways to feed and hold your livestock). Due to this, beef that gets imported into Germany from Brazil, thanks to Mercosur without any tariffs, will be magnitudes cheaper than locally made. This kills your local farming sector and also does massive damage to Brazil’s citizen and enviroment (its a massive brainfuck how farming works there). If you want to counteract this you could charge tariffs, so that the consumer starts preferring locally made products, because they are cheaper. This also is an incentive for Brazil to better regulate its farming industry.
tariffs could work if you’re not the US. the problem is the US doesn’t make anything.
for normal countries you could use tariffs to encourage products made inside the country. but for that to haopen:
- you need the products to already be manufactured inside the country
- you need to have targeted tariffs that apply specifically to those products and not blanket tariffs that would apply to each and every part of product, which would make it infinitely more expensive to manufacture inside the country than outside.
so for example if your country has a decent production of bananas but people for some reason prefer to buy imported bananas way more than homemade ones, you might have some tariffs on bananas to try and reduce waste.
for that to be effective, you can’t also have tariffs on soil, farming equipment and whatnot that might be going into your homemade potato production. otherwise you’d have homemade potatoes more expensive then imported ones.
cows_are_underrated@feddit.org 9 hours ago
AA5B@lemmy.world 4 hours ago
Blind, overall tariffs can’t work anywhere.
Pretty much every country, including US, has successfully applied targeted tariffs to specific things for specific reasons. Usually you’re protecting an existing industry, but you could even build a supply chain by balancing it with targeted incentives, and bringing them together with a long term strategy to grow that specific segment.