[16] China's accession to the WTO meant that it had to liberalize its economy, and reduce state interference, which boosted the efficiency of Chinese exporters.
[17] As China already had "most-favored nation" (MFN) status since the 1980s in Europe and the United States, WTO accession did not lead to lower trade barriers.
[17] However, China's MFN status had been subject to annual approval by Congress in the United States; research has suggested that this caused uncertainty, and discouraged China-U.S.
[28] One analysis also found that it contributed to Donald Trump's victory in the 2016 presidential election: "A counterfactual study of closely contested states suggests that Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania would have elected the Democrat instead of the Republican candidate if, ceteris paribus, the growth in Chinese import penetration had been 50 percent lower than the actual growth during the period of analysis.
[30] A 2016 study found that exposure to Chinese import competition led to greater high school graduation rates in the United States.
He states that the "PNTR has been implicated in some of the most significant and distressing trends of American life in this century: millions of well-paying manufacturing jobs lost; declining family formation and rising deaths of despair; soaring real-estate prices and medieval levels of urban inequality; increased political polarization and populist movements, left and right; and faltering faith in the power of liberal democracy to respond to these and related challenges.