Exports in Developing Asia: No Catching up to China

As U.S. President Donald Trump's new trade war is narrowing in on China, other nations in Asia are seeing a window of opportunity to expand their exports to the United States, a major buyer of goods.

However, as data from the International Trade Center shows, no other nation in developing Asia is coming even remotely close to China's export prowess. Countries like India, Indonesia or Vietnam can theoretically provide the workforce and other framework for the production of low or medium-value goods, but progress in the export trade has been slow. Smaller nation Vietnam has been growing exports most quickly over the past 20 years and in this respect already rivals larger countries in the region like India or Indonesia. Potentially because of this, the nation had also received a hefty reciprocal tariff from the Trump administration, but this has now been paused along with higher tariffs on other countries, while China's tariffs have stayed in place.

The Indian government has been looking to support factories and Prime Minister Narendra Modi has spearheaded an initiative called "Make in India". Manufacturing in India most recently made up only 13 percent of GDP, The New York Times reports, half of the rate in China and other East Asian nations. As new factories are starting out, it takes time to built up supply chains and operations are heavily dependent on imports, the report finds. Finding suitable staff is also an issue widely reported as India has been among the developing nations where the education sector has been found unfit to teach skills needed by the employment market and has also not been regulated sufficiently. Finally, courts and bureaucracy that are hardly functioning as well as corruption are giving factory owners a headache, even though improvements have been made.