There are lots of things that would provide a response, but let me just look at this issue for 10,000 feet.
We know that the US and Canada share a common border, but they are two different worlds. There are a number of things that control how goods and services cross the border.
First, in the manner of tourism.
Trade based on tourism assumes that American dollars enter Canada with the tourist, and Canadian dollars enter the US in the same way. That means the retail shops must deal with exchange rates and there must be money exchangers who will do the exchange for a small percentage.
Because the Canadian dollar does not buy as much as the US dollar, there is an unfavorable trade balance, as a Canadian who earns $10 an hour has to work almost 2 hours for the same dollars as the US worker. The taxes in Canada are higher than the taxes in the US as Canada has socialized medicine and everybody pays for that. So what we find is that there is economic pressure on the Canadians to NOT enter the US as tourists.
At the same time, because the US dollar is worth so much more, the US worker has to work about 1/2 hour to earn the same as the Candian worker, so the balance of trade is favorable. This means that US workers are much more likely to vacation or travel through Canada than the reciprocal.
The trading in the industrial or commercial fields is a different breed of cat. In this, the dollar exchange rate is the same, but the US and Canadian governments have put taxes or tariffs on products to encourage or discourage the importing or exporting of products. This means that there is another layer which has a direct impact as the governments try to level the playing field. So even though the dollar buys in the same ratio as the first example, now we find that there are additional costs. The tariffs are not made to help the individuals, but are made to insure that the importing of goods does not harm the reciever nation. It also looks at the condition on the receiving end, not on the sending end.
So if automobiles were being imported to Detroit that were 1/2 price, you would find that the US would add tariffs to the importing of automobiles to make sure that the people of Detroit did not lose their jobs because the automobiles were so much less expensive and that encouraged US people to purchase their cars from Canada.
This is a very general picture, but you can see the complexity of trying to regulate the trade between countries.
2007-01-08 19:38:06
·
answer #1
·
answered by The Answer Man 5
·
0⤊
0⤋