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SeedPublished 2026-10-23

Who paid the 2025 tariffs?

Tariffs and the trade war appear on 184 recent papers, mostly in the economics journals, but only 47 carry a price, pass-through, incidence or inflation keyword, and "tariff pass-through" on 3. The 2025 tariff rounds were larger and broader than those of 2018. Did foreign exporters cut prices this time, or did consumers pay again?

economicstrademacroeconomics

What prompted this#

Since October 2025, 184 papers carry a tariff or trade-war keyword (119 in economics journals, 43 in finance): "US-China trade war" on 48, "tariffs" on 39, "import tariffs" on 18, "trade war" on 12. Only 47 of them also carry a pass-through, consumer-price, price, incidence, inflation or welfare keyword, and "tariff pass-through" appears on 3.

Questions#

  • Did import prices at the border fall after the 2025 tariffs, as they mostly did not in 2018, and did the answer differ by exporter country and product?
  • How much of the tariff reached retail prices, and how quickly?
  • Did importers reroute through third countries, and did that limit the pass-through?

Data that could help#

Monthly import price indices and customs data by product and origin, retail scanner prices, and the tariff schedules with their effective dates.

Next step#

Estimate border price changes by product for the 2025 tariff rounds using monthly customs unit values and compare them with the 2018 estimates.

The keywords this note follows, in the tracked finance, accounting, economics, management, operations research and AI journals as of 2026-10-26
KeywordPapers, last 30 daysRankPapers per month, Oct 23 – Oct 26*Papers, last 36 months
tariffs3#776101
import tariffs0–49
trade war2#130327
tariff pass-through0–5

Markdown version of this note: /ideas/tariff-pass-through-in-the-2025-trade-war.md

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Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Who paid the 2025 tariffs?. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 23, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/tariff-pass-through-in-the-2025-trade-war

@misc{scholar4ai-ideas-tariff-pass-through-in-the-2025-trade-war,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Who paid the 2025 tariffs?},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/ideas/tariff-pass-through-in-the-2025-trade-war}},
  urldate = {2026-10-23},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}

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