Trade has been gaining negative attention throughout the past two decades. Stemming from the loss upon China’s accession to the WTO in the U.S. manufacturing industry, combined with the recent trade disputes under the Trump administration, this dissertation aims to use the U.S. agriculture industry as an example, utilizing a well-known county-level exposure rate construction method to analyze how trade has been benefiting the local agricultural outcomes here in the United States. The dissertation consists of three Chapters. In the first Chapter, we use county-level data on agricultural outcomes and data on China’s imports of U.S. agricultural commodities to study the effect of growing U.S. agricultural exports to China on U.S. county-level outcomes. We find that the “China Shock” had a reverse effect on U.S. agriculture than it did on the manufacturing sector. We show that exposure to exports that China demands strongly and positively impacts U.S. county-level farm and employment outcomes. In the second Chapter, we investigate what U.S. agriculture loses facing foreign import competition following similar trade exposure rate construction. We quantify how exposure to specific agricultural imports from the top 20 international suppliers in the world would affect the U.S. domestic county-level outcomes. We find that import exposure strongly and negatively impacts local farm-related employment and income, but the society’s overall employment rate and income are positively connected with import exposure, indicating the existence of import competition. But the damage caused is likely absorbed by other industries and the aggregated influence from import exposure is beneficial. In the last Chapter, net trade exposure rates show less variation across U.S. counties compared with export and import exposures. The net trade exposure largely benefits U.S. county-level aggregated net farm income and agricultural employment share of the total working-age population, contradictory to what has been discovered in the manufacturing industry. The change in net trade exposure during the trade war periods, which was directly affected by the Trump administration’s trade policies and its associated consequences, contribute to the achievement of their political targets and result in an increase in county-level voting shares in their favor.
