What Is Your Trade IQ?

In the May edition of uschamber.com, the following quiz appeared:

True or False: Trade destroys American jobs.

False. More than 57 million Americans work at companies that benefit from international trade, according to the U.S. Treasury Department. That's 40% of the private sector workforce.

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True or False: Large corporations make up the majority of U.S. exporters.

False. Some 97% of the 239,000 U.S. companies that export their products are small and medium in size. Though large companies account for the majority of export volume, their smaller counterparts produce nearly a third of all U.S. merchandise sent overseas.

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True or False: Trade has exacerbated the current recession in the United States.

False. In recent years, exports have been the one bright spot in a very gloomy economy. Strong export growth partly counted the contraction in other parts of the U.S. economy in 2007 and 2008.

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True or False: The United States remains the world's largest exporter.

True. The value of U.S. exports in goods and services approached $2 trillion in 2008, refuting claims that the United States can no longer compete against lower-cost developing countries. The United States exported $1.05 trillion worth of manufactured goods, $552 billion in services, and $115 billion in agricultural products last year.

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True or False: Free trade agreements (FTAs) have little positive impact on U.S. exports.

False. In 2008, 40% of the U.S. exports went to the 14 countries with which the United States have FTAs, even though those countries represent just 7.5% of global GDP.