Vietnam promises to combat the illegal transfer of Chinese goods: report

Vietnam says it is willing to combat the fraudulent transfer of Chinese goods through its territory, Reuters News Agency Reported todayWhile the two countries are starting with negotiations on a mutual trade agreement.

During his announcement of the “Liberation Day” on April 2, US President Donald Trump Vietnam hit 46 percent “mutual” rate, one of the highest percentages in the world. Threatened with a possible existential threat to the economy export guided by export to the US account for 23 percent of GDP from Vietnam-Vietnam did not waste time in searching for dialogue with Washington.

While the Trump administration has since announced a 90-day freezing in the performance of the rates, and now have the two countries open discussions About a mutual trade agreement after Vietnamese vice -prime minister Ho Duc Phoc meeting with American trade representative Jamieson Greer earlier this week. According to the Reuters report, Vietnam hopes “to get the tasks back to a reach of 22 percent to 28 percent, if not lower.”

In addition to lowering his own rates for American goods, which offered the Communist Party of Vietnam -Chef to Trump last week, the Reuters report suggests that Vietnam will offer to combat the illegal transfer of Chinese goods to the US via Vietnam.

When announcing the start of commercial interviews with the US, the government of Vietnam said yesterday on its official portal that the “trade fraud” would fight, without offering details, Reuters reported.

The news agency too reported The fact that the Government Office of Vietnam, a body that coordinates between its various ministries, held an “emergency meeting” with government trading experts on 3 April, hours after Trump’s rate announcement. “During the meeting, the commercial service and customs officials were told that they had to sharpen the checks and were given two weeks to come up with a plan to clamp an illegal transfer,” the report stated, referring to a person present during the meeting. It added that civil servants would get a deadline at the end of April to prevent China, whose leader, XI Jinping, Set to visit Hanoi on April 14, April.

Economically, Vietnam was one of the big winners of Trump’s first term of office. While multinational companies set up factories in Vietnam to reduce their dependence on China as a production basis, the country in 2017-2023 raised his export share to the US in all categories of products. Accordingly, his trade surplus with the US reaches, reached $ 123.5 billion last yearjustify $ 38.3 billion in 2017.

The successes that Vietnam has made a winner of the first Trump government have now made it a target of the second. One of the stories purchased in the American policy circles is the idea that the rising export from Vietnam to the US consists of Chinese goods diverted via Vietnam to avoid the Trump 1.0 rates.

Speaking at Fox News last week, Trump’s Hawkish Trade adviser Peter Navarro Vietnam accused of actions as a “transfer” point for Chinese goods, descriptive It as “essentially a colony of communist China.” Navarro suggested that No less than a third From Vietnamese export to the US were actually disguised Chinese goods.

China has certainly played an important role in the tree in Vietnamese exports to the US, the growth of Vietnamese import from China has Kept The growth of Vietnamese exports to the US and the debts of Vietnam in Vietnam with the US is matched by a crooked trade deficit with China. Given the power of Vietnam in China-Centrated supply chains and the dependence on the industry of Chinese production input, this is only to be expected.

At the same time, few would deny that there is real rate discharge going on. The fact that the Vietnam government office has ordered a performance suggests the official consciousness of the problem. Reuters paraphrased a source that said that “in some cases ships with Chinese made goods lived just long enough in Vietnamese ports to obtain documents that certified that the products were made in Vietnam before they left.”

In a recent article for the interpreter Groeven Roland Rajah and Ahmed Albayrak in the data collected by the Asian Development Bank and concluded that the share of ‘indirect Chinese content’ in the export from Vietnam to the US indeed ‘increased’, indeed 28 percent of this amount in 2018.

Due to the lack of more detailed data, this figure does not seem to make a distinction between pure rate discharge-het to hit a “made in Vietnam” label on Chinese goods and the fact that many Vietnamese goods, in particular electronics, contain large numbers of Chinese components. This raises a question: how much value must a product be added before it is considered legitimate “Vietnamese”?

Other sources estimate that the level of illegal transition is lower. In one Article for Nikkei Asia In January, economist Trinh Nguyen called a Harvard study in which the flow of identical products that passed from China to the US via Vietnam discovered, but a maximum of 16 percent of the total in a certain quarter. In the meantime, measuring trade flows within the same company, only 1.8 percent of the goods “was marked as a re -routing at company level.” The BBC mentioned another trade investigation that the figure for converted goods 7 percent.

The bigger problem, such as the Rajah and Albayrak assertionsIs that the focus on Vietnam as an economic “back door” on the American market overlooks the ways in which Vietnam has positioned itself as a vital link in global supply chains.

“China clearly played a major role in the flourishing export from Vietnam to the United States,” they wrote. “But China is not the main story. Vietnam itself, and other supply chain partners, play the most important role. Moreover, Vietnam can use the right policy over time and increase the inflow of investments to move the value chain, which gradually reduces the dependence on foreign input, including from China.”

Given the vengeful mood of the Trump government, and the almost challenging weak manner on which the “reciprocal” rates are calculated, it is unclear whether these awards mean a lot. As such, it makes sense for Vietnam to publicly tackle our concerns about illegal transfer and to take action to tackle real rate discharge. It is also likely that Vietnamese officials will try to impress their American counterparts that if they want Vietnam to reduce the economic dependence on China, it is unlikely to suffocate the export from the country to the US.