President Trump is announcing another round of tariffs across 66 countries. That includes South Dakota’s top three importers: Canada, China and Brazil respectively.
While the exact impacts aren’t hashed out yet due to negotiations, one SDSU economist said changes could be on the horizon.
The latest round of tariffs, or taxes on foreign imports that American taxpayers pay, are expected to take effect Thursday. Although consumers haven’t seen significant impacts yet, one economist said the time might be now.
Evert Van der Suis is a professor of economics at SDSU. He said South Dakotans should be concerned about the impact of tariffs on agriculture’s access to foreign markets. He believes it’s just now beginning to show up in the numbers.
“If you look at the newsletter from the federal reserve bank of Minneapolis, they show that the quarter of the first quarter 2025 GDP for there for all the states in their region pretty much except for Michigan was going down," Van der Suis said. "And so, so we do see that impact where we you know our agriculture export markets have declined.”
He added that economists have debated why the numbers haven’t reflected impacts to the consumers, but in his opinion…“What happens is that it may take awhile for these tariffs to find, find their way all the way to the consumer for various reasons.”
He said now may be time we see that happening. Because there is a gap between when a policy is announced to when impacts are finally seen…“So that enables businesses to stock up on imports, on products they needed for manufactured, needed to buy inputs, intermediate type of products," Van der Suis said. "And so they didn’t need to pass on these higher costs. But for some goods of course they didn’t maybe, up until now they were able to swallow these costs, these extra costs. But of course, businesses cannot do this forever, especially when their margins get really squeezed.”
He said he thinks “we are about at that time when businesses are slowly going to do some of that” and pass the costs onto the consumers.
He pointed to data from the Yale Budget Lab that says in the short-term, Americans are going to see about 2% price increases, or about $2,400 per household. He said that could lead to economic slowing.
