Economists find China killing US factory jobs

Washington

A GENERATION of economists trained to believe that trade had little to do with the long decline in high-paying US factory jobs is changing its mind.

Their findings are likely to fuel the opposition within President Barack Obama's own Democratic Party to his proposed 12-nation Trans-Pacific Partnership and similar pacts lowering barriers to international commerce.

Because manufacturing employment as a share of the workforce has been dropping for more than 40 years and the same trend has affected other developed nations, including Japan, with far less liberal trade policies than the US, many economists had concluded that automation was the primary culprit. But studies examining the impact of China's entry to the World Trade Organization (WTO) in late 2001 have made the case that between one …