Articles

# Unfair Trade Policies Destroyed Lives — And There’s Empirical Proof

The White House
April 9, 2025

When career politicians sold American workers out to foreign countries, not only were entire communities destroyed — Americans’ lives were also shattered by higher rates of alcohol abuse, drug overdose, and suicide.

Studies have repeatedly shown the human impact of bad trade policies:

- A 2020 study in American Economic Review: Insights found that “areas more exposed to a plausibly exogenous change in international trade policy exhibit relative increases in fatal drug overdoses, specifically among whites,” concluding that there is “a relationship between a plausibly exogenous change in US trade policy and drug overdose fatalities among working-age whites, helping to explain the alarming rise in ‘deaths of despair’ among this group since 2000.”
- A 2019 study in SSM-Population Health found that from 1999 to 2015, “job loss due to international trade is positively associated with opioid overdose mortality at the county-level.”
  - “In general, the loss of 1,000 trade-related jobs was associated with a 2.7 percent increase in opioid-related deaths.”
  - “When fentanyl was present, the same number of job losses was associated with a 11.3 percent increase in such deaths.”
- A 2018 article in the Journal of International Economics found that “data from the U.S. Trade Adjustment Assistance (TAA) program reveal that, across locations, one extra TAA trade-displaced worker is associated with the overall employment falling by about two workers amidst muted geographic mobility.”
- A 2020 article in SSM-Population Health noted “several recent studies have suggested a link between economic deterioration in labor markets and increased opioid deaths. Monnat (2018), found a cross-sectional association between manufacturing dependence and average drug-related mortality rates across U.S. counties. In a separate analysis, Monnat (2019) found that drug mortality rates for non-Hispanic whites are larger in counties designated as service sector-dependent in comparison to counties designated as non-specialized.”
  - Monnat (2018): “Counties reliant on heavy manual labor industries, like mining and manufacturing, that have suffered substantial employment downturns and wage stagnation in recent decades, may have higher drug-related mortality rates.”

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