For decades, the global supply chain and markets have been considered an enterprise utopia, until the US trade tariffs imposed earlier this year forced a reckoning on many countries of the world.
There are cracks in a system reliant on an ever-expanding global production and consumption model, and as the labour nucleus of the world, Asia has been hit heavily.
Several Asian countries with large exports to the US have been hit with high tariffs: 20 percent on Vietnam, Sri Lanka and Bangladesh, 19 percent on Cambodia and Pakistan, 15 percent on Japan and South Korea, among others.
India currently faces the highest tariff rate at 50 percent, with a 25 percent punitive element for its oil trade with Russia.
John Beirne, principal economist with the Asian Development Bank (ADB), said that these tariffs have been the…
