When such measures were gradually eased in the second half of the year, bilateral trade rebounded for most ASEAN member countries, with positive year- on-year changes in both imports and exports being recorded for Cambodia, Malaysia, Thailand, and Vietnam by the end of the year. [...] SHIFTING TRADE STRUCTURE IN THE PANDEMIC Did the global pandemic affect what was being traded between China and ASEAN? Table 1 shows China’s top 20 export and import products in terms of value (in billion USD) and percentages (of total imports and exports) with ASEAN in 2020 and 2019 (see Data Appendix C for the descriptions for all product chapters).6 On the import side, there are remarkable simi. [...] The picture is dramatically different on the export side with significant reshuffling of the top 20 list.8 Half of the product categories in the 2019 list were replaced by new ones in 2020. [...] The impact of the global pandemic on the structure of bilateral trade is also evident in the changes of foreign value added in China’s exports to ASEAN.12 Foreign value added (FVA) is the foreign content such as raw materials and intermediate goods imported from other countries that is embodied in exports. [...] They suggest that the repercussions of the pandemic on other trading partners of a country, and on its own demand for imports from a specific country, will depend not only on pandemic-related measures in the respective countries, but also on the demand and supply of third countries in the global production networks.
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- 20
- Published in
- Singapore
