Well-meaning if misguided politicians often tout job creation when they promote preferential trade agreements: freer trade will mean higher exports (the benefits of imports are almost never mentioned), and more exports means more production, which means more jobs. That narrow focus is understandable, especially in times of above-acceptable unemployment, when every bill seems to need a jobs angle to sell: witness, for example, Secretary of Agriculture Tom Vilsack’s verbal gymnastics in a statement yesterday, when he referred to the multi-year spending binge that is the Farm Bill as the “Food, Farm and Jobs Bill”. Politicians, not being the most courageous of creatures, don’t usually have the stomach/spine/etc. to make a principled stand in favor of free exchange across borders for its own sake (if you want to read more on the case for free trade, there are plenty of publications available at the Herbert A. Stiefel Center for Trade Policy Studies website, starting with our position statement at the bottom of the homepage).
Unfortunately, the extent of job creation is hard to quantify, and the case may be oversold. Edward Alden at the Council for Foreign Relations yesterday drew our attention to a recent International Trade Administration study that looks at the jobs created by exports and finds, well, that exports create fewer jobs than often is promised, and that the “job intensity” of exports is falling: