Last year’s US-imposed tariffs sped up significant trade shifts—toward Mexico and away from China—that began years earlier and have diversified American imports among top partners.
While the Trump administration’s major tariff announcement on April 2, 2025, was billed as “Liberation Day,” research by Harvard Business School’s Laura Alfaro suggests that companies were already positioned to adjust to the levies. The recalibration of supply chains has been so profound that US imports from China have returned to near-2001 levels, when the country entered the World Trade Organization.
Alfaro, the Warren Alpert Professor of Business Administration, collaborated with Davin Chor, professor at Dartmouth’s Tuck School of Business, to examine how the “great reallocation” occurred, using trade data from the Census Bureau, covering over 5,300 product categories. They detailed their findings in the November working paper, “An Anatomy of the Great Reallocation in US Supply Chain Trade,” published by the National Bureau of Economic Research.
These five charts illustrate key aspects of the global supply chain reshuffling:
