Researchers warn
Trump plan threatens 1.2 million German jobs
January 15, 2025 – 7:35 a.mReading time: 1 min.
President-elect Donald Trump is about to begin his second term in office. If he follows up his threats with action, it would hit the German economy hard.
The punitive tariffs on imports announced by future US President Donald Trump could cause serious economic damage in the Federal Republic. According to a study by the Prognos Institute, 1.2 million jobs in Germany are dependent on exports to the USA, the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” reported on Wednesday. That is ten percent of all twelve million jobs that are directly and indirectly dependent on exports – and 400,000 more than are based on exports to China.
While the share of exports to the USA in all German exports has increased in recent years, the share of sales to China has decreased, it said. Trump wants to reduce the US trade deficit with higher tariffs and, in doing so, target all countries that have been “ripping us off for years,” as he says. During the election campaign, he spoke of tariffs of at least ten percent on all imports, 60 percent on Chinese products and even 200 percent on car imports from Mexico.
If Trump implements his tariff plans and other countries respond with counter tariffs, 300,000 jobs could be lost in Germany, according to calculations by the Institute for Macroeconomics and Economic Research (IMK), the “Süddeutsche Zeitung” reported. In a second scenario, in which Trump implements tariffs at the lower end of his previous announcements, 200,000 jobs would still disappear in Germany, according to IMK.