Proposing New Metrics for Economic Security Policy

The United States increasingly uses economic tools — sanctions, export controls, emergency tariffs, investment restrictions, and industrial subsidies — for national security reasons. These actions have major consequences for American workers and communities, yet they largely bypass systems used to study how trade policies affect the workforce. These systems were designed to study trade measures, not sanctions, export controls, or other tools of economic statecraft that also affect U.S. workers.

Even for tariffs, trade models can simulate specific retaliatory scenarios, but they are not designed to study the dynamics of economic statecraft, in which foreign actors may respond in various ways that compound costs for American workers. Nor do they assess national security issues, such as the loss of domestic capacity in strategic sectors.

To fill this gap, RAND researchers propose a Worker Return-on-Investment scorecard. This approach would help policymakers study how economic security policies affect the U.S. workforce, integrating analysis of foreign responses and national security concerns with direct assessments of economic impact.