SAINT SIMONS ISLAND, GEORGIA (February 6, 2017) – Americans fed up by slow economic growth and a lack of blue-collar manufacturing jobs are widely credited with electing Republican Donald Trump president last November. Although there was little official talk of the presidential election at the Georgia Foreign Trade Conference, numbers provided by Walter Kemmsies, an economist and managing director at real estate services provider JLL, shows that frustrated voters were not imaging frustratingly slow growth in the US economy.

“The fundamental problem is, in all of these years, we haven’t seen the public sector in our country as a whole step up and do what’s necessary to get us to prosperity,” he told attendees of the conference sponsored by the Georgia Ports Authority. “The fact is, economic growth and employment growth have slowed down. Part of it is natural because our population is aging, and part of it is stupidity. We did some pretty dumb stuff in last 20-30 years, and it resulted in lower investment spending growth and therefore lower productivity growth and therefore lower GDP growth. It’s pretty straightforward,” he said.

Kemmsies also echoed the view of many Americans who believe that world trade has world trade has disproportionately benefitted the country’s trading partners. The Obama Administration’s negotiation of the Trans-Pacific Partnership, of which the US was to be the anchor member, became so unpopular with American voters that both Trump and Democratic challenger Hillary Clinton vowed to scuttle the deal were they to be elected president. In fact, withdrawing from the multilateral trade deal was one of the first actions undertaken by Trump.

“We have supported global trade. We have helped the world economy develop. A lot of people in the world today have a standard of living they wouldn’t have had the United States [not] made the decisions [it made],” Kemmsies said. “Unfortunately, we forgot about something: We didn’t invest in infrastructure. Every other country that signs a trade agreement turns around and invests in infrastructure to support its exports. What do we do? We didn’t even invest in infrastructure, must less for exports, and the consequence is, we didn’t benefit a lot from trade. Everybody else did, but we didn’t. We really need to wake up to that fact and not blame other countries and trade practices and things of that nature.”

See more on the Georgia Foreign Trade Conference in the February issue of Asia Cargo News.