Many items Americans use daily come from overseas—whether the clothes they wear, snacks they eat, or the materials and machinery used to construct their homes, offices, and roadways.
The U.S. imported more than $3 trillion in goods in 2023—down about 5% from the year before. Trade slowed globally in 2023 as months of interest rate hikes (intended to slow inflation) also tempered demand for goods. Despite the overall dip, the country still increased imports of some items substantially.
Machinery Partner used Census Bureau trade data to identify the 25 U.S. imports that grew the most from 2022 to 2023, out of hundreds of commodities tracked by the agency. These commodities are ranked by their one-year percent growth in import values.
Among the most common fastest-growing U.S. imports were items related to construction and manufacturing. The import values of building materials such as mortar, concrete, sand, gravel, stone, woodwork, and iron and steel pipe grew substantially from 2022 to 2023. Imports of some machinery, such as trucks, trailers, stackers, and metalworking tools also rose.
The rise of these tools and materials is perhaps unsurprising in the wake of several federal infrastructure investment initiatives. Over the past couple of years, the federal government has pumped $563.6 billion into public infrastructure projects across the country as of July 17, 2024—building and repairing roads, bridges, and ports as well as investing in clean building and manufacturing efforts. Still, some of the rise in import values can also be attributed to the sharp increase in the cost of building materials, which were elevated by global tensions, trade disputes, and supply chain disruptions.
Food items were also prevalent among the fastest-growing imports. This category was also plagued by dramatic cost inflation and production disruptions in recent years. Agricultural goods are particularly affected by the severe weather patterns that have become more frequent and intense as a result of climate change.
For instance, U.S. import values for sugarcane and sugar beets both spiked in 2023, following abnormally dry weather which weakened sugar production and escalated its trade value. The U.S. will have to import even more expensive sugar this year as harsh weather conditions in Mexico, its primary supplier, have depleted the country's harvest.
Meanwhile, some of the most common items imported to the U.S. experienced decreases in 2023. Those included oil, gas, phones, and computers. The nation has increased its own oil production in an effort to decrease its reliance on other countries. In 2024, the United States produced more crude oil than any other nation in history, according to the Energy Information Administration. The U.S. broke records for crude oil production by averaging 12.9 million barrels per day in 2023, breaking a 2019 record. It's a record that will be unmatched for some time to come, according to the EIA, given that Saudi Arabia's plans to increase production to 13 million barrels per day were nixed.
What's more, an executive order issued in March 2022 banned the import of Russian oil, gas, and coal in retaliation against Russia's war on Ukraine, eliminating a trade stream that previously brought in hundreds of thousands of oil barrels daily.
The decreases in computer and phone imports come as tensions have grown between the U.S. and China, which has traditionally served as a primary source of U.S. electronics. China was ousted as the leading source of goods imported by the U.S. in 2023, falling behind Mexico for the first time in over 20 years. The U.S. government and domestic companies have increasingly prioritized trade with closer countries—both in terms of geography and political allyship.
Product demand, inflation, climate change, and geopolitical factors are changing the dynamics of international trade. Read on to see which U.S. imports have grown most as a result.
