Donald Trump Is Tanking One of America’s Greatest Exports in the Middle of a Trade War

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The United States exports more than $44 billion per year in education and accompanying services. This is more revenue than any other category of services: more than travel services, more than business services, more than financial services, and many multiples of computer, health, and legal services. In fact, education raises more revenue from foreign countries than all but a handful of categories of American goods and commodities, only slightly less than pharmaceuticals and far more than iron and steel, plastics, furniture, dairy products, and even soybeans.

https://archive.ph/8sM98

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I was somewhat surprised, when digging into commodity codes, that China is a net importer of US-made medical devices. The same medical devices that the Chinese government is mulling over dropping tariffs for. Now, its not as if Chinese companies don't have competing products; far from it.

 

But an incredibly complex supply chain. China is also a net importer from Mexico, which I think really means some subassembly work is done there.

 

I analysed one device from an American manufacturer. Its a respiratory virus testing kit, consisting of test strips, some little bottles of reagents and an electronic reader for the test strips.  Some assembly is conducted in 3 different plants in the US. The company also adds something its making in its Chinese plant. Its engaging with 3 third parties. One is a Singaporean outfit, a specialist in electronics, and they are having parts put together in Malaysia. Another company is Dutch, who turn out to be a specialist producer of virus, and the only company who can do this kind of service. The third is a small US company providing a QC. Currently, in the US, there are about 150,000 different medical device product lines, all with similar, complex, finely balanced supply changes. Any change in manufacture requires approval from the FDA, which might include physical inspection of a facility, and, if some element of the device is changed, a complete reassessment.

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3 hours ago, placeholder said:

The United States exports more than $44 billion per year in education and accompanying services. This is more revenue than any other category of services: more than travel services, more than business services, more than financial services, and many multiples of computer, health, and legal services. In fact, education raises more revenue from foreign countries than all but a handful of categories of American goods and commodities, only slightly less than pharmaceuticals and far more than iron and steel, plastics, furniture, dairy products, and even soybeans.

https://archive.ph/8sM98

 

 

Yeah, but opponants argue that these foreign students are taking up places on campuses that should go to Americans, and that foreigners are driving up fees. Which is obviously complete bollards, because increased fees for international students actually serves to subsidise domestic students.

 

One of the attractions of the US education system is its quality, a quality built upon quality staff who lead in research activity, and salient publication outputs.  Of course journal publications are directly related to research activity. Salient means articles published in top, high impact journals that are most influential in the development of mankind. Reduced research activity means less publications. One way to achieve that is to reduce core funding (federal). Universities, for some areas, can plug the gaps through increased industry funding. One of the impacts of that is that the research output is much more protected; not everything is patented, but what isn't patented becomes know-how, and you don't talk about know-how. So academic publication output falls, and many more will become corporate shills, not necessarily shilling for American companies. At the same time international student interest in US universities starts to wane, impacting university non-research income. That leads to home student fees increasingm and a worsening of investment in facilties. It starts to impact the hiring of staff, then the layoffs, and the decline of US education starts.

 

Its no sure thing to be top of the academic pile. Before WW2, if you wanted to get on in the physical sciences, you needed to at least be prepared to publish in German. That ended once Germany killed half of its scientists for preaching the wrong sort of science (eg. Heisenberg's views on "jewish science").