Our friends at EPI have an interesting report out today that looks specifically at the portion of the U.S. trade deficit with China that is due to U.S.-based Wal Mart, the world’s largest retailer.

As previously reported by EPI, the between 2001 and 2006, the $235 billion trade deficit with China cost the U.S. 1.8 million jobs. Today’s report shows that Wal Mart was responsible for $27 billion of the trade deficit, which resulted in nearly 200,000 American jobs being displaced, and American manufacturing was the hardest hit.

“The manufacturing sector and its workers were hardest hit by the growth of Wal-Mart’s imports. Wal-Mart’s increased trade deficit with China eliminated 133,000 manufacturing jobs, 68% of those jobs lost from Wal-Mart’s imports.”

As ManufactureThis has pointed out before, the trade deficit with China is the result of the continuing efforts to bypass the rules it agreed to when it entered the WTO in 2001. From illegal subsidies, dumping and currency manipulation to suppressed wages of workers, China continues to play by a different set of rules, and as the EPI report clearly points out, the it’s costing American jobs and undercutting American producers and manufacturers.

This entry was posted on Tuesday, June 26th, 2007 at 6:06 pm and is filed under Manufacturing in the U.S., Holding China Accountable, Currency Manipulation, Economic Security, Enforcing Trade Laws. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.