End the trade war with China or miss out on future growth, ex-World Bank economist warns US
- World’s second-biggest economy will continue to expand even if conflict with US goes on for decades, government adviser Justin Lin Yifu says
- And America’s loss will be EU’s, Japan’s, South Korea’s gain
If the United States maintains its trade war with China it will miss out on the benefits of the Asian nation’s future growth, a former chief economist with the World Bank and senior economic adviser to Beijing said in Hong Kong on Thursday.
Unlike other emerging economies like Russia, India, Brazil and Turkey, China has good investment opportunities to realise its growth potential, said Justin Lin Yifu, who is also a professor at Peking University.
And if the US misses out on those opportunities, they will be snapped up by other players, like Japan, South Korea and the European Union, he said.
“As long as China keeps growing, it will have to import more and the market will be available to other economies if the US does not want to compete within it,” Lin said in his keynote speech at an event organised by the think tank Our Hong Kong Foundation titled “China’s New Economic Era in the Face of Escalating Trade Conflicts”.
He predicted that China’s economy would continue to grow even if the trade war lasted for decades. For instance, if the trade conflict continued until 2050, he said, China’s economic growth rate would slip to about 6 per cent from now until 2020, before slowing to 4.5 per cent between 2021 and 2035, and to 3.5 per cent from 2036 to 2050.