伟大的贸易重组

The great traderearrangement A newly defined “rearrangement ratio” gauges the potential torearrange US imports from China and how this could ripple acrossthe globe. by Olivia White, Jeffrey Condon, Chris Bradley, Michael Birshan, Sven Smit, and Camillo Lamanna At a glance —Amid pressure on US–China trade, firms may look torearrangesourcing to alternative suppliers.Ifthey cannot, firms might insteadreducepurchases,replaceimported products with something similar,orramp updomestic production. These alternatives require a combination of sacrifice, resources, know-how, and time. —We introduce a “rearrangement ratio” to quantify how hard the change might be.Thirty-fivepercent of US imports from China have a ratio less than 0.1, signifying a global available export marketten times larger than current US imports from China—think T-shirts or logic chips. For higher ratios,rearrangement becomes harder, and for the 5 percent of trade with a ratio greater than 1.0—for example,rare earth magnets—US imports from China exceed available global exports. —Consumer goods are harder to rearrange than business inputs.Sixty-one percent of business inputimports have a rearrangement ratio less than 0.1, versus 16 percent of consumer goods. Major productslike laptops, smartphones, and toys are harder to rearrange. —Europe emerges as the fulcrum of trade rearrangement.Across nine varied simulations, Europeanimports from China and exports to the United States both go up by nearly $200 billion. As intra-European trade shifts to the United States, it leaves holes filled by increased Chinese exports—assuming Europe does not choose to alter its own trade policies. Others will be affected, too: exports tothe United States from as many as 70 countries may increase by more than 10 percent. —Prepare for resilience in a reordering world.Strategies will need to handle continued uncertainty andongoing shifts. Customers will buy new things from new sources and use them in new ways. Granularityis key. Shifts across many thousands of products will reshape the geometry of global trade. Introduction Yet substantial trade tensions between the UnitedStates and China could be here to stay.1Whencombined with prior policy measures, tariffs andgeopolitics clearly correspond: economies that aremore “geopolitically distant” from the United States,particularly China, tend to face the highest tariffs(Exhibit1). If current settings persist, US importsmay shift from China to countries that face lowertariffs and historically have been more geopoliticallyaligned with the United States. Tariffs have surged into the public spotlight.OnApril 2, 2025, the United States unveiled country-specific tariffs, defined by a formula based on goodstrade deficits. Tariffs have substantially recededfrom those highs since and may continue to shift inthe coming weeks and months as negotiations andcourt challenges unfold. Exhibit 1 Tariffs rise with geopolitical distance from the United States. Trade-weighted tariff by economies’ geopolitical distance from the US¹ McKinsey & Company Even before 2025, the geometry of trade hadbeen shifting along geopolitical lines. The averagegeopolitical distance of global goods started tocompress beginning around 2018, particularly forthe United States and China—evidence of so-calledfriendshoring. US imports from China fell by about20 percent, or more than $100 billion, between2018 and 2024, while total US imports rose byalmost 30 percent over the same period. rearrangement ratios imply greater difficultysourcing a product from other countries (seetechnical appendix on page 25“Understanding therearrangement ratio”). The basic intuition is that if imports are smallcompared with all available global exports,rearrangement should be relatively easy. Forexample, the United States imports roughly$4 million worth of chocolate bars from China eachyear, while the available global export market—exports from all countries other than China andgoing to all countries other than the UnitedStates—is nearly $6 billion. Correspondingly, therearrangement ratio is close to zero ($4 million ofimports divided by a $6 billion available market).High tariffs on Chinese chocolates will not disruptAmericans’ access to the confection. Recent events may accelerate this realignment.Many US firms are urgently considering alternativesources of supply. Without a shift to differentsources, prices may rise, and US companies andconsumers might need toreduce—making do withfewer products or inputs—orreplace, substitutingone product for another sufficiently similar one. Thehigher the tariffs, the more significant the potentialreduction or replacement. But for ratios greater than 1.0, a country’s importsexceed available global exports, making simplerearrangement impossible. For example, theUnited States sources about $3 billion in Christmasdecorations from China. The total available globalexport market (that is, all Christmas decorationscurrently exported by economie