The United States, which had been the top-rated global power in 2016,
fell 18 percentage points during President Trump's first year in office.
President Donald Trump's unpopularity overseas could be lowering American exports by billions of dollars as foreign demand for U.S. goods moves in tandem with international respect for the Oval Office, according to a new study from the University of California, Berkeley.
The study looked at imports and exports data from over 200 countries between 1948 and 2017 along with Gallup approval polling data for the leadership of five exporters by participants in 157 countries between 2006 and 2017.
Andrew Rose, a professor and economist at Berkeley's Haas School of Business Administration, used a total of 6,411 Gallup observations available for the percentages of participants approving and disapproving of the leadership for foreign countries. He supplemented that with surveys from the BBC and the Pew Research Center.
Combining those two datasets, Rose estimates that the roughly 20 percentage point decline in foreign approval of American leadership between 2016 and 2017 lowered American exports by at least $3 billion.
"Countries whose leadership is approved abroad tend to sell more exports, holding all else equal," Rose wrote. So-called soft power — the ability of one country to attract or win over citizens in another — is a significant determinant of export demand.
In other words,
countries buy more goods from countries with leaders they respect.
Popularity contest
That may prove problematic for Trump, whose first year in the Oval Office was marked by a plunge in overseas approval ratings.
The median global approval rating of the job performance of U.S. leadership across 134 countries stood at a new low of 30 percent, according to a 2018 Gallup report. That was down nearly 20 points from the 48 percent approval rating in the last year of President Barack Obama's administration, and 4 points lower than the previous low of 34 percent in the last year of President George W. Bush's administration.
Trump's average domestic approval rating — which hovers around 40 percent — is also lackluster when compared with his predecessor's.
"An increase of one percentage point in net (American) leadership approval boosts (American) exports by around one one-hundredth of a percent," Rose wrote. It's an "economically large effect, given that swings in leadership approval are often over twenty percentage points, as occurred both when Obama succeeded Bush in 2009 or when Trump succeeded Obama in 2017."
The economist noted that that calculation is conservative if countries that are large importers of American products also disapprove of Trump disproportionately.
The International Monetary Fund data cover bilateral trade between over 200 countries between 1948 and 2017, while Gallup's rating metrics — a proxy for soft power in this study — provide annual percentages of approval and disapproval.
"The drop in foreign approval for leadership in 2017 compared with the eight previous years is a phenomenon unique to the United States," the economist wrote, pointing to little changes in foreign perception of German, Chinese and Russian leadership over the past several year.
Reply With Quote
Originally Posted by Danke
Connect With Us