Connecticut lost 27,300 jobs and the U.S. has shed millions more in recent years due to the nation’s one-sided trade relationship with China, a Washington economic think tank and critics said Tuesday.
Connecticut’s job losses were among the nation’s highest and contributed to the 2.4 million manufacturing and high-technology jobs lost or shuttled abroad from 2001 to 2008, the Economic Policy Institute said.
China joined the World Trade Organization in 2001. U.S. trade deficit with China has risen from $84 billion in 2001 to $270 billion in 2008, an average increase of $26.6 billion per year, EPI said.
Growing trade deficits cost jobs in every state and congressional district, the EPI report found, including the District of Columbia and Puerto Rico.
Connecticut’s 5th congressional district, which covers Meriden, New Britain, Waterbury and the Farmington Valley, among others, was especially hard hit, EPI said.
Rep. Chris Murphy, who represents the district, in a statement late Tuesday from his Washington office said he is aware of the trade imbalance and that he has “been applying pressure on [Obama] administration officials to take concrete steps to level the playing field for Connecticut businesses and workers.”
The computer, electronic equipment and parts industries experienced the largest growth in trade deficits with China, resulting in 628,000 job losses — 26 percent of all jobs displaced between 2001 and 2008, EPI said.Â
Other hardest-hit districts were in California, Texas and North Carolina, the institute said.
Meanwhile, the Alliance for American Manufacturing, a nonprofit collaborative of steelmakers and steelworker, says the EPI is evidence that China’s trade policies and currency manipulation are unfair to its trade partners.
“China’s cheating is causing America to lose more than just the capacity to make widgets in the one-sided trade arrangements with China,” Scott Paul, AAM’s executive director, said in a statement accompanying the EPI report. “Sophisticated electronics and high-tech products that once were made in the United States are increasingly being made in China instead. We are losing more and more of these good jobs.”
