What’s Driving the U.S. Trade Deficit?

By Ehsan Soltani – Visual Capitalist

The United States has had many major trading partners over the decades, with annual imports and exports from them both totaling trillions of dollars.

Ever since the 1970s, the country’s imports started to overshadow exports and the U.S. trade deficit began to grow. Once the 1990s began, fueled by globalization-friendly policies around the world and cheap international goods, the trade deficit began to climb even more rapidly.