interesting discussion. as several have mentioned there are really a lot of facets to international trade and a lot of reasons why a product might be cheaper from one place or another :

1: it’s a locally produced item that gets marked up a whole bunch by middlemen and distributors who each have to cover their overhead, advertising etc
2 : it’s an OEM item sold in bulk to a manufacturer or distributor in the country where the manufacturing occurs, at a lower price because OEMs get volume discounts, don’t pay the same share of advertising and distributions costs, etc
3 : the manufacturer dumped a lot of components into a market at sub-cost to build market share and kill competitors.
4 : currency fluctuations have caused the price in USD to be cheaper than it would be to buy the item from the manufacturer/distributors at current exchange rates.
5 : it’s fake and isn’t actually the same item
6 : it’s a locally produced item which is a well made copy of an original design from the western world, and you’re paying much less because labor is much cheaper overseas, other business costs are lower, and the company selling it to you didn’t actually do the work to design and market the item originally.
7 : it’s a locally produced item which is a poor quality copy, so in addition to lower costs it’s actually not the same quality.
8 : it’s a locally produced commodity item which really doesn’t require any design, isn’t a copy of anything specific, and is cheaper simply because labor and materials and other overhead are less.
9 : it’s a locally designed and produced item, not a copy or a fake, benefitting from all the same lower costs as above.

personally, i’m not comfortable with most of the above except 1,4,8 and 9, and am pretty convinced the long term effect of people making these choices is a poorer, more unhappy, more unequal world, even if you saved a few bucks here and there. the other big problem is you really have no idea which one it is most of the time!