“Wisconsin’s Shifting Import Economy” | Econbrowser

That’s the title of Wisconsin Policy Forum Focus #9 released earlier this week.

Here’s what Wisconsin imports in the way of goods:

Here’s what Wisconsin exports (from Wisconsin Policy Forum, Brief #6, 2025):

Notice that industrial machinery and electrical machinery are the top two categories in both imports and export; that’s intra-industry trade.

What these two graphs don’t tell you is what share of exports are accounted for by imported inputs. I don’t have this information at the Wisconsin state level but here are estimates at the national level. I’ve circled in red the corresponding categories, in the figure below.

Source: Slok, “Foreign value added in US exports,” Apollo, May 1, 2025.

Why is this important to Wisconsin. Assuming these ratios are representative for Wisconsin, this means that tariffs on imports into the US result in negative effective rate of protection for exports.

Consider an exported machine tool, which originally sold for $100,000 (under free trade). If a tariff of 10% is applied to imported inputs, of total value of $40,000. The  Then the effective rate of protection is -6.7% (=((100,000-44,000)/60,000))-1). = 0.067.

Going to reality, if imported components account for about 12.5%, and a 30% tariff is applied to inputs (say they’re Chinese). then the effective rate of protection is -4.1%…

Here are Wisconsin imports through March:

Figure 1: Wisconsin goods imports in millions $ (blue), in millions 2000$ (tan), both seasonally adjusted. Series adjusted by author using X-13 in logs. Deflation using nationwide all-commodities price index. NBER defined peak-to-trough recession dates shaded gray. Source: BEA, BLS, NBER, and author’s calculations.