핵심요약

• EU가 2025년 미국 관세에 대한 보복 조치로 1,100억 달러 규모의 수출을 타겟팅했습니다.
• 보복 관세의 경제적 영향에 대한 실증적 연구가 부족하다는 점이 강조되었습니다.
• EU의 보복 조치가 국내 인플레이션에 미치는 영향을 평가하는 연구가 진행되었습니다.

도입

이 기사는 최근 글로벌 무역 정책의 변화와 관련해 EU의 보복 조치가 경제에 미치는 영향을 분석한 연구를 소개합니다. 특히, 보복 관세가 retaliating economies에 미치는 영향에 대한 실증적 연구가 부족하다는 점을 강조하며, 투자자들에게 중요한 정보를 제공합니다.

본문 1: EU의 보복 조치 규모와 영향

EU가 2025년 미국 관세에 대한 보복 조치로 1,100억 달러 규모의 수출을 타겟팅한 것은 글로벌 무역 정책의 변화에 대한 중요한 신호입니다. 이 규모는 이전의 어떤 보복 조치보다 크며, 이는 EU가 미국과의 무역 갈등에서 더 적극적인 입장을 취하고 있음을 보여줍니다. 이 조치가 EU의 무역 구조와 경제에 미치는 영향은 매우 크며, 특히 인플레이션 압력을 증가시킬 가능성이 있습니다.

본문 2: 보복 관세의 경제적 영향 분석

보복 관세가 retaliating economies에 미치는 영향에 대한 실증적 연구가 부족하다는 점은 중요한 문제입니다. 기존 연구는 주로 미국 중심의 데이터를 분석했지만, EU와 같은 다른 경제 bodies의 구조적 차이를 고려하지 못했습니다. EU는 국제 무역에 더 크게 의존하며, 한 번에 여러 무역 partners 중 하나만 타겟팅하는 경우가 많습니다. 이러한 차이는 보복 관세의 경제적 영향을 평가할 때 중요한 변수가 됩니다.

본문 3: 장기적 전망과 리스크

EU의 보복 조치가 장기적으로 미치는 영향은 아직 명확하지 않습니다. 그러나 인플레이션 압력과 무역 파괴의 가능성은 계속 관찰되어야 합니다. 또한, 글로벌 무역 정책의 변화는 지속적인 모니터링이 필요하며, 투자자들은 이러한 리스크를 고려하여 포트폴리오를 조정해야 합니다.

결론

이 기사는 EU의 보복 조치가 경제에 미치는 영향을 평가하는 중요한 연구를 소개하며, 투자자들에게 유용한 정보를 제공합니다. 향후 글로벌 무역 정책의 변화와 관련된 리스크를 지속적으로 모니터링하는 것이 중요합니다.

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원문 링크: https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMihgFBVV95cUxQaEJuMU5lZG1MMlZfQkFHNmZMTnlLY09LRDdqRUhOcmZXR2dRNENmSVN5bDZxbWhKWU14Ml90UFItVTVyeXdlV3E0VDh5SHFxaE9jSWZabWJWTmtHa1hDcGp3SURmRlN2ZjViVkJUZW1laHR4TGp4bWlHQmZac2lWc252Uk4xQQ?oc=5

The design and effect of tariff retaliation: Evidence from the EU - CEPR

The foreign response to recent shifts in US trade policy emphasises that tariff retaliation is an inextricable element of a less multilateral and more protectionist global trade order. While most of the retaliatory threats triggered during the 2025 trade disputes have been suspended following bilateral truces, these agreements are often incomplete and fragile. Consequently, the risk of tariff retaliation remains exceptionally high on the global trade policy agenda.

A burgeoning economic literature has documented the costs of increasing protectionism (Fajgelbaum et al. 2019, Amiti et al. 2019), including the distortionary effects of the 2018-2019 US-China trade war (Fajgelbaum et al. 2023, Iyoha et al. 2025). Researchers have also analysed the political economy motives behind retaliatory targeting (Fetzer and Schwarz 2021), its impact on US agricultural exports (Grant et al. 2021, Morgan et al. 2022), and the hypothetical macroeconomic fallout of different retaliation strategies (Gnocato et al. 2025).

However, one fundamental gap in the trade war literature remains: there is surprisingly scarce empirical evidence regarding the impact of tariff retaliation on the retaliating economies themselves. Understanding this impact requires looking beyond US data, because the structural design of retaliatory tariffs differs profoundly from unilateral US tariffs, and most retaliating economies rely much more on international trade but typically only retaliate against one of many trading partners at a time.

This scientific gap is particularly glaring for the EU, which compiled a sizable retaliation package against US tariffs in 2025, targeting about $110 billion in imports. To gauge whether a retaliation of this scope would spark domestic inflation requires a robust and data-driven empirical framework. In our recent research (Fisgin et al. 2026), we develop and apply this framework to assess the trade destruction and inflationary consequences of the EU’s 2018 retaliation package against US steel and aluminium tariffs. While the 2018 package was significantly smaller (targeting $3.3 billion of imports), it provides the test case to evaluate the potential effects of the 2025 proposal.

The US administration imposed tariff rates of 25% on steel and 10% on aluminium imports in March 2018. The EU's initial exemption expired on 1 June 2018, and the duties hit approximately $7.5 billion worth of European exports. In response, the European Commission implemented a rebalancing package on 22 June 2018. The first stage of this package applied 10% and 25% ad-valorem duties on US imports valued at approximately $3.3 billion. The targeted products ranged from industrial materials like steel and aluminium to high-visibility consumer goods, including bourbon, motorcycles, playing cards, and apparel. The EU suspended its retaliatory tariffs after about 3.5 years, on 1 January 2022, following a joint EU-US statement in October 2021, which included a commitment to relinquishing the steel and aluminium tariffs as well as the retaliation.

The EU’s retaliation was fundamentally asymmetric to the triggering US tariffs. While the US tariffs exclusively targeted intermediate inputs, the EU distributed its tariffs across a wide variety of products, with final consumption goods and intermediate inputs each making up about half. This design was a deliberate attempt to avoid putting pressure on the input prices of domestic downstream industries and to curtail negative effects on European employment and economic activity.

Crucially, the EU systematically targeted goods with low US import dependence. Using a Herfindahl-Hirschman Index (HHI) to evaluate import-partner concentration across thousands of import product codes, we find that the vast majority of tariffed products were not at risk of supply chain disruptions. As shown in Figure 1, only a minuscule fraction of tariffed goods cleared the European Commission's formal threshold for a ‘strategic vulnerability’ (HHI above 0.4 and import share above 50%). In the only two instances where reliance on a US supplier was exceptionally high — whiskey and playing cards — the EU still ensured that a wide array of alternative non-US suppliers was available, allowing European importers to efficiently substitute away from US exporters.

Figure 1 Herfindahl-Hirschman Index vs. US import share by tariff status

A central question in current policy debates is whether trade wars cause temporary market frictions or permanent global reallocations. Our empirical analysis provides clear evidence that retaliatory tariffs, even if they are expected to be temporary, lead to trade diversion hysteresis — or permanent ‘scarring’ effects. We find that import values of the targeted US products collapsed rapidly as they fell by about half starting in the second month after the implementation of the EU’s retaliatory tariffs. This sharp, sustained decline is clearly visible in the trade data and illustrated in Figure 2.

Figure 2 12-month proportional change in total import values

We make an even more striking finding in the data after the retaliatory tariffs were officially suspended in January 2022. Our estimates show that the import demand response to the implementation of the tariffs was roughly twice as large as the response to their suspension. In other words, US import shares to the EU failed to recover to their pre-2018 levels and remained permanently depressed. A plausible reason for this asymmetry is that reconfiguring global supply chains entails high, irreversible sunk costs. Hence, European importers chose to maintain their newly established relationships with non-US suppliers rather than revert to their previous partners once the tariffs disappeared.

Standard trade theory implies that the incidence of a tariff depends on the relative elasticities of supply and demand. If domestic demand is highly inelastic or substitution is difficult, tariffs are a direct tax on domestic businesses and consumers. When examining unit values in the trade data, we find that US exporters did not lower their pre-tariff prices to absorb the costs of the EU retaliation. Instead, as shown in Figure 3, the 12-month change in tariff-inclusive import prices climbed by 20 to 30 percentage points immediately following implementation. Hence, the retaliatory tariffs were rapidly and comprehensively passed through into the ‘at-the-dock’ import prices paid by European importers.

Figure 3 12-month proportional change in import prices

This finding mirrors the prevailing evidence on US tariff pass-through reported by, for example, Cavallo et al. (2021) and many others. Importantly, it demonstrates that even when tariffs target comparably small import values and products with low import dependence, they are still characterised by near-complete pass-through.

The high and immediate pass-through of the EU’s retaliation points to a critical concern: did the retaliation spark domestic consumer or producer inflation? To answer this question, we innovate upon existing data infrastructure by developing a granular concordance framework that maps highly disaggregated trade data to European consumer and producer price indices. This allows us to construct precise tariff exposure measures for the EU and for each of the 27 member states.

Examining the evolution of these measures, we find no evidence that the retaliatory tariffs generated domestic inflationary pressures. Across 31 producer price industries and 34 consumer price categories, the relationships between tariff exposure and price changes are statistically indistinguishable from zero. This holds true even when we employ an event-study framework to compare high-exposure product-country groups to low-exposure groups.

What explains this finding? We argue that, in addition to the design of the retaliation package, its small size was critical. When we compute the maximum hypothetical impact on the most exposed consumer products in the EU, we find that the retaliation would have only lifted the month-over-month growth rate of the consumer price index between June and July 2018 by an additional 0.02 percentage points — a negligible effect. Put differently, the retaliation was small enough to avoid upward pressures on EU domestic prices.

The absence of an inflationary spike due to the EU’s 2018 tariff retaliation was not a coincidence; it was the result of strategic policy design. By keeping the overall scope of the retaliation moderate, distributing the burden between intermediate inputs and final goods, and intentionally targeting products with high substitution elasticity, the European Commission successfully maximised external political pressure while insulating the EU economy from cost-push inflation.

As policymakers prepare for the possibility of renewed tariff escalations, our research provides a dual lesson. On the one hand, a retaliating economy can engineer a trade policy response that avoids domestic self-harm. On the other hand, deploying these protectionist tools — even temporarily — forces a reconfiguration of supply chains that leaves permanent, irreversible scars on bilateral trade.

Finally, ongoing research by Fleck and Pradhan (2026) indicates that the ‘inflation-immaculate retaliation’ cannot be scaled up indefinitely. In particular, the EU's proposed 2025 retaliation package is two orders of magnitude larger than the 2018 retaliation. Thus, its implementation would come at a significantly higher risk of exposing European producers and consumers to price shocks.

Amiti, M, S Redding and D Weinstein (2019), "The Impact of the 2018 Tariffs on Prices and Welfare", Journal of Economic Perspectives 33(4): 187-210.

Cavallo, A, G Gopinath, B Neiman and J Tang (2021), “Tariff Pass-Through at the Border and at the Store: Evidence from US Trade Policy”, American Economic Review: Insights 3(1): 19-34.

Fajgelbaum, P, P K Goldberg, P Kennedy and A Khandelwal (2019), “ The return to protectionism ”, VoxEU.org, 7 November.

Fajgelbaum, P, P K Goldberg, P Kennedy, A Khandelwal, and Taglioni (2023), “ The 'bystander effect' of the US-China trade war ”, VoxEU.org, 10 June.

Fetzer, T and C Schwarz (2021), “Tariffs and Politics: Evidence from Trump's Trade Wars”, The Economic Journal 131(636): 1717-1741.

Source: https://news.google.com/rss/articles/CBMihgFBVV95cUxQaEJuMU5lZG1MMlZfQkFHNmZMTnlLY09LRDdqRUhOcmZXR2dRNENmSVN5bDZxbWhKWU14Ml90UFItVTVyeXdlV3E0VDh5SHFxaE9jSWZabWJWTmtHa1hDcGp3SURmRlN2ZjViVkJUZW1laHR4TGp4bWlHQmZac2lWc252Uk4xQQ?oc=5