De-risking economies from Chinese supply chain not a quick process: CEA Nageswaran

De-risking economies from Chinese supply chain not a quick process: CEA Nageswaran

Chief Economic Advisor V Anantha Nageswaran on Friday said the de-risking economies from the Chinese supply chain is not going to be a quick process for the world and will take much longer than thought.

“When we talk of de-risking the China supply chain, we should be under no illusion that it is not something that can be achieved at the speed with which you can put out a tweet. It is going to take much longer,” Nageswaran said while speaking at the Indian Institute of Management-Kozhikode’s inaugural annual conference on macroeconomics, banking, and finance.

China’s involvement in global trade is such that any diversification of supply chains is going to be extremely difficult for other countries. In fact, when countries try to do so, it only results in rerouting of Chinese products, he said.

“Vietnam’s exports to the US and imports from China have surged since the US-China trade tensions emerged in 2018. At the same time, Vietnam’s imports from China went up, and, if you look at the data for Thailand, Mexico, etc, the same story emerges,” he highlighted.

Speaking on globalisation, he said, “In terms of global trade volumes, it is very difficult to disentangle the effects of economic slowdown and the fact that there could be trade restrictions, both of the tariff variety and non-tariff variety. Of course, countries are focussing on friend-shoring and reshoring, all those things are definitely happening.”

“So, it is not that we are in the golden era of globalisation. But, based on trade data, it is difficult to make out the case that we are definitely becoming more fragmented,” he added.

Nageswaran said he wasn’t sure if the world was becoming more fragmented even though the general commentary says that is the case.