https://www.businessinsider.de/china...18-6?r=UK&IR=T
Quote:
"How much value does a country or a company add to the process is what counts," Shvets writes. "But our current trade statistics do not reflect value but rather flows."
Deutsche Bank economists Zhiwei Zhang and Yi Xiong came to a similar conclusion earlier this year, writing in a note to clients that the US-China trade balance is "clearly misleading." They pointed out that it doesn't account for hundreds of billions of dollars in sales made by US companies run abroad, also known as subsidiaries.
US subsidiaries sold $223 billion goods and services in China in 2017, according to a Bureau of Economic Analysis survey. Those weren't counted toward the US's goods and services trade deficit with China, which was a record $375 billion last year.
And a lapse in data can also be seen at the company level, Zhang and Xiong said. Apple generated $48 billion in revenue from China in 2016, mostly from iPhone sales. But, according to trade data, China imported only $1 million of cell phones from the US that year.
"From an international trade perspective, iPhone sold by Apple's Chinese subsidiaries are not counted as imports," Zhang and Xiong wrote. "But from an economic and financial perspective, iPhone is a US product, and the US benefits the most from it."
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In a German article I just read about this, they explained that the real surplus may be just one tenth of the number claimed by Trump.
In a similiar fashion the Us tzries to make Europe beleive that the EU has a big surplus in exports into the US. Truth is that many branches of for the uS high relevancen namely IT services and non-product/non-material services in general are being excluded form the math of Trump, and that if these would get factored in, the export surplus still would be a surplus - but it would be turning into an American one.