WASHINGTON

HAD THE UNITED STATES conducted smarter trade policies over the last decade, the economy would grow this year by an amount nearly four times greater than the biggest conceivable boost from the new stimulus package — and a recession wouldn’t be imminent at all. Better yet, this trade-related growth would have shrunk the federal budget deficit, not expanded it, according to new research on U.S. trade flows from the U.S. Business and Industry Council.

The stimulus proposal backed by the president and Congress will pump $152 billion into the U.S. economy this year and $16 billion next year. The impact on economic growth will be far less — because as few as 20 percent of American consumers plan to spend their tax rebates (as opposed to investing them or repaying debts), because many of the products bought will be imported (which stimulates little domestic production), and because each dollar of business tax breaks yields much less than a dollar of growth.

Yet even if all of the stimulus money created demand for new U.S.-made products and services, the effects still would have been dwarfed by those of simply keeping annual imports of manufactures at the same share of U.S. manufacturing consumption they hit in 1997.

Ten years ago, imports represented 19.46 percent of all manufactured goods bought in the United States. By 2006 — the last year for which data are available — imports had grown to 27.70 percent of a much larger U.S. market for these goods. If manufactures imports had only grown as fast as the domestic manufacturing market over that decade, in 2006 they still would have topped $927 billion. But they would have been $584 billion less than their actual levels that year.

If the U.S. economy had grown at the same rate during this period, that $584 billion worth of new orders for manufactured goods in 2006 would have been filled by U.S.-based factories and their workers, not their foreign counterparts. Comparable results would have been achieved in the years since, too. The $584 billion manufacturing boost for 2006 is nearly four times the size of the stimulus package for this year, and represents nearly 4.2 percent of the entire American economy today. That’s more than enough additional growth to keep recession at bay.

Limiting imports would have helped the country keep its finances under control, too. Largely because he believes that the economy will keep slumping despite the stimulus package — and that overall tax revenues will therefore remain depressed — President Bush now predicts that the deficit will more than double over the next fiscal year, from $162 billion to $410 billion.

By contrast, the domestic output gain generated by better balanced trade would have been narrowing the deficit as soon as imports started to fall — by yielding increased taxable domestic business revenues and wages.

How could better trade policies reduce imports? First, by refocusing U.S. trade-expansion efforts on countries not heavily reliant for growth on exporting to the United States. Since the negotiation of the North American Free Trade Agreement, Washington has signed most of its new trade deals with countries either too small or too poor or too indebted to produce many growth opportunities on their own. Selling to the United States, the world’s most open single national market, was always a much better bet. Small wonder total imports of goods have more than doubled since 1997.

American trade diplomats should instead focus on further expanding trade with the much higher-income markets of Western Europe and Japan, where the basics for domestic-oriented growth already exist, and the pressures to export are much less intense.

Second, Washington must much more effectively limit imports of unfairly produced and traded foreign goods that literally steal customers from law-abiding U.S. producers. Subsidization, dumping, currency manipulation, cartelization, and intellectual-property theft are increasingly the way business is done by America’s leading trade partners. Yet these practices have nothing to do with free markets or free trade, and the U.S. government must shut the guilty parties out of the highly prized U.S. market.

Smarter trade policies will increase opportunities for growth through exports, too. But the biggest gains are likeliest on the import side because U.S. exports are barely half as great as imports, because for the past decade they have been increasing much more slowly, and because access to the U.S. market is far easier for Washington to control than access to foreign markets.

The lessons of the last decade are clear: Tax breaks will put a little candy in consumers’ pockets. But the big opportunity for healthy growth is helping America’s producers regain lost shares of their home U.S. market.

Alan Tonelson, an occasional contributor, is a research fellow at the U.S. Business and Industry Council Educational Foundation, a contributor to its www.AmericanEconomicAlert.org Web site, and the author of The Race to the Bottom.