DUBLIN, May 11 (Xinhua) -- Despite the United States (U.S.) and its allies steadily broadening the scope of their export control measures, the ensuing supply chain decoupling is likely to remain only partial, Fukunari Kimura, a professor of economics from Japan's Keio University, told an economic forum in Dublin on Thursday.
Organized by the University College Dublin (UCD) Irish Institute for Chinese Studies and the Confucius Institute, the two-day forum on the impact of deglobalization brought together over 30 economic experts and scholars from 14 countries and regions including China, Japan, South Korea, Vietnam, Britain, France and Sweden.
According to Kimura, countries like Japan "must establish a well-balanced trade policy" as a decoupling policy is "not free of charge."
He also said that the cost of a policy aimed at hitting opponents in the strategic competition is likely to be borne by firms and industries that are otherwise competitive internationally.
Besides, such policy measures might also distort competition between Japanese, U.S. and other allies' firms, he said.
But there is still time to adopt a cautious approach, because so far, "international trade statistics at the industry level do not show clear evidence of supply chain decoupling in East Asia due to the U.S. export controls, at least up to 2022," he said.
Riikka Nuutilainen, a senior economist with the Bank of Finland, concurred saying that despite all the decoupling measures and ongoing discussions on this issue, "there seems to be only little evidence of global decoupling ... Global trade has continued to grow at about the same pace as it has been growing since the global financial crises."
"Our analysis of the global investment and trade flows pre and post trade-war corroborates the findings of existing literature that although bilateral flows between the U.S. and China have been hurt, there is still little evidence of a wider decoupling or (the) world splitting into competing blocks, even if we look specifically into technology-intensive manufacturing," said Nuutilainen.
Liming Wang, a professor of economics at UCD who also attended the forum, told Xinhua that deglobalization is against the historic currents and will not benefit anyone.
