From the website of Dr Cielito Habito (formerly Philippine Economic Planning Secretary) at http://cielhabito.multiply.com/
When the US sneezes…
It is often said that when the US economy sneezes, Asia – and much of the world, for that matter – catches a cold. And the reason for this is that as the biggest economy in the world, the US tends to be at or the near the top of many countries’ list of biggest trading and investment partners.
For the ASEAN-5 countries (Indonesia, Malaysia, Philippines, Singapore and Thailand), the US remains among the two biggest buyers of their exports. It may surprise some people to know that within our neighborhood, it is not the Philippines but Malaysia that now has the greatest export dependence on the US, which buys one-fifth (19.5 percent) of that country’s merchandise exports.
For the Philippines, China recently dislodged the US as our biggest export buyer, accounting for one-fifth (19.5 percent) of our own exports, against the US’s 16 percent – suggesting that these days, it is China’s sneeze that we need to be more wary of.
We have come a long way in reducing our trade dependence on the US since the 1990s, and this is good. In 1990, the US took 38 percent of our merchandise exports, with Japan a far second at 19.8 percent. China was a non-entity in our foreign trade then, taking less than one percent of our exports at the time.
Images from Microsoft Clipart
