A study from the German Institute for Economic Research (DIW) reviewed by Reuters suggests that Germany may be a modest beneficiary of planned U.S. port fees on merchant ships constructed in China. DIW's modelling shows German exports to the United States could increase by about 2% compared with a counterfactual in which the fees are not implemented.
The study attributes the potential upside to structural differences in national freight fleets. German shipping operators depend less on vessels built in China than some rival exporters do, a gap that could allow German firms to gain U.S. market share when the new charges raise shipping costs for competitors that rely more heavily on China-built ships.
The U.S. government intends to impose the port fees starting in November as part of an effort to blunt China’s lead in global shipbuilding, citing national security concerns. Under the proposal, the additional charges would be levied according to the location where a vessel was constructed rather than on the origin of cargo or ownership of goods transported.
DIW cautions that the policy would not be without domestic downside for the United States. The institute estimates U.S. imports would shrink by 0.2% and U.S. exports by 0.3% as higher shipping costs feed through into the price of intermediate inputs and reduce competitiveness and economic activity.
"The mechanism is simple," DIW economist Sonali Chowdhry said. "The fees raise the cost of intermediate inputs, U.S. manufacturers lose competitiveness, and weaker economic activity also weighs on demand for foreign goods."
The distributional effects across countries are uneven. Within the European Union, DIW finds the sharpest drops in exports to the U.S. would be in Finland, Denmark and Poland, with declines of 5.0%, 4.4% and 3.0%, respectively. Several emerging economies face even larger setbacks: Costa Rica, Vietnam and Pakistan could see U.S.-bound shipments fall by nearly 9% under the simulated policy.
Not all countries are projected to lose out. South Korea is among the potential gainers in DIW’s scenario, with U.S.-bound exports rising by about 2%.
The DIW analysis underscores how a policy targeting the origin of vessels rather than cargo can reconfigure trade costs and relative competitiveness among exporters, with implications for shipping, manufacturing and trade flows across affected economies.