Like his predecessors, Trump has chosen an easier yet less helpful path for the US, while he’s clearly aware that to make America great again, “reform and opening-up” instead of “America First” is needed, said Shou Huisheng, a research fellow at Tsinghua University’s National Strategy Institute, writing for the Chinese online version of the
Financial Times.
US economic openness has remained at a very low level, Shou said, pointing to the percentage of a country’s trade volume against its GDP as a typical indicator of its openness. Since the 1980s, the percentage in the US has remained between 20 and 30 percent, while the figure is 50 percent in the UK and France, 80 percent in Germany and as high as 70 percent in China after it joined the WTO.
Shou said the US figure isn’t at all surprising, given the low efficiency and excessive financial burden faced by the country’s manufacturing sector. The US’s economic advantage is primarily in the financial sector rather than manufacturing, he said.
Although the number doesn’t entirely speak for a country’s economic vitality, it does reveal its limited resilience against market turbulence, Shou said. Once competition becomes too intense in international markets for a country’s industrial transformation to cope with, the scholar said, hostility against global trade and immigration tend to grow.
Germany and most emerging economies, including China, which have already suffered similar pangs in the 1990s, have become more resilient to such pressure, while those who haven’t, like the US and some European countries, are faced with a more pressing situation.
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