Member-only story
The ongoing health and economic crisis has hobbled international trade within Asia, and between the region and trading partners globally. Quarantines, border closures, visa restrictions, curtailment of business activities, and enforced social distancing measures caused a sharp drop in regional imports and exports during the first half of the year. Let’s look at the outlook for Asia’s trade, identify key mega-trends and draw some policy implications for the region.
Asia’s Trade Outlook
In its “optimistic scenario”, the World Trade Organization’s forecasts that Asia’s merchandise exports for 2020 will decline 13.5%, and imports 11.8%. In its pessimistic scenario, the WTO sees a much sharper fall of 36.2% and 31.5% for exports and imports in 2020, respectively.
After a brutal beginning to the year, some Asian economies have begun to move out of first gear, such as China, Thailand, and Vietnam. Yet developing Asia as a whole is projected to see virtually no growth in 2020. A full recovery will take time and will be uneven across countries and sectors going into 2021, but this will depend on the effectiveness of policy interventions, commercial relations among global powers, the extent to which COVID-19 has been contained and national supply responses.
