[tesseract]

This kind of waste seems common and from an outside perspective very frustrating.

There is a famous example where Ford imported cargo vans from Europe to the US with disposable seats in them so they would be taxed (more cheaply) as passenger vans. I think the tax in question was referred to as the "chicken tax".

The situation is a bit different but China's value-added tax scheme combined with the prevalence of factories in bonded export zones leads to a lot of useless shipping of goods (or components of goods) from China to Hong Kong (or another nearby foreign jurisdiction) and back for no good reason other than to avoid tax. I'm sure this works out great for the local freight industry...

[witty_username]

I just can't wrap my head around protectionism. We lose, and they lose, and such crazy inefficiencies occur.

[tmoertel]

But somebody wins, and that's who's usually behind the protectionism in question.

[flyinghamster]

That was the Ford Transit Connect. One of the big ironies of that whole situation was that back in the 1960s, Ford was a beneficiary of the tax (which was mostly aimed at Volkswagen). After the tax was enacted, the Type 2 pickup and cargo van disappeared from VW's US product lineup.

The loophole has been closed, and Ford no longer sells the Transit Connect in the US.

[yuhong]

This also reminds that Hynix had to be bailed out in 2001 and in 2003, US and EU imposed high tariffs as a a consequence. I wonder what would happen if Hynix actually failed and had to be bought by Micron.